I do understand the overall point they’re trying to make here. As someone who’s been around the web and internet since the early 90s, there was a certain magic to the chaos of those early days.
However, this bit:
A couple of imageboards still exist, who remind us of a different time. You may not like it, but even 4chan is such a place and i am happy that dumpster is still around.
really makes me wonder about OP. 4chan/8chan/et al have caused incalculable harm. The the world would be a better place if they were completely eradicated, and would have been an even better place had they never existed at all. Sites like those aren’t indicative of a different time, they’re indicative of the true depths of hatred, toxicity, and sheer chaotic evil people are capable of when given an anonymous platform and no moderation.
You make a point. If we were to relive the 90s both technology-wise and before corporations put their hands on it (so, assuming plenty of websites done by users), I am sure there would be quite a few websites filled with hate, racism, xenophobia etc…
It’s not just the corporate greediness that changed. It’s the mentality as a whole. We live in a stressful time period where being aggressive towards other people is more of a norm than, say, creating genuine content with lots of colors because that is cool. In the 90s I feel like people were just enjoying life and did not have to worry much. At least, that’s how I perceive it. Even piece of arts like music or movies felt more genuine and happier.
But the author also makes a point that corporations certainly did not make it better.
Yeeeah I sure wouldn’t want to be trans on the internet in the 90s. Or a woman, either. Or Black.
I think it’s easy to remember the good parts over the bad, and to not see the empty spaces where people weren’t allowed into the club at all back then. At least some of the lost civility was just a facade, and limited to a very specific in-group.
But I do think social media algorithms that prioritize rage for ads are a real problem that makes everything feel worse, too. I’m glad Twitter is going down fast.
Also I agree with you in that I could do with more happy media. But of course only the best/most popular media from prior decades is preserved and remembered and celebrated, so I think any seemingly loss of quality is likely survivorship bias + personal taste + the difficulty of finding things when there are a lot of things.
One of my own personal sources of media joy is ao3, and that wasn’t founded until 2008, and only entered beta in 2009. That alone means heaps and heaps of well-organized (so well organized!) fanfiction - including humor and fluff and other happy stuff - that I love to bits and that didn’t exist at all until recently. Every time ao3 goes down a crowd of distressed people flood Down Detector and exclaim about how they were just in the middle of their [insert hyperspecific fanfic here] and got left on a cliffhanger - it’s kinda adorable.
Keep in mind that a lot of the “bad” of today is just people noticing the bad that’s been there all along.
People still make fun colorful content, and we make more of that now than we did in the 90s.
It’s just that the hateful angry people didn’t have Internet access then, and they do now.It wasn’t considered okay to talk about a lot of problems at the time, and it is now.
The Internet of the 90s is incompatible with billions of people using it.
Once you make Internet access less something that only a small group of relatively privileged people have access to, and less are interested in, and something that a more representative sample of the world can use and want to use, you find out that people more often prioritize sex, cats, banal updates on their friends and family, gossip, and to get it in a easy to absorb package.
The personalized, colorful web pages became streamlined, conforming to modern design standards and sacrificing individuality for uniformity.
There are some pretty big advantages to ‘modern design standards.’ For one, they make the Internet a less hostile place to users with accessibility needs. I don’t have problems viewing clashing colors, flying gifs, jumbled pages with no sanity, etc, but a hell of a lot of people with various disabilities sure do. I don’t want to even think about how screen readers try to deal with pages like that. Web1.0 offered absolutely nothing for those users who needed accessibility.
This kind of reminds me of the car nostalgia and the complaint that nowadays they all look samey. Turns out it’s not because they’re built by big soulless corporations (they are though), but because that vaguely roundish running shoe look is what you get when you optimize for efficiency and you apply safety regulations.
I feel like both things are true with this one. I mean, at least they could be more creative with the paint, surely? Or detailing? Maybe some fun etchings? Fun car interior designs?
It’s a mass-market product so I do get why they don’t, but man, there are way too many boring gray and white cars that just match the pavement.
Many of us have this kind of feeling. That’s why there are: Small web, inidie web, Gemini… Without being extremist with noJS websites (even if it’s not a bad idea), let’s create content outside platforms. I hope a day blogs will come back and RSS reader became back a trend. So we’ll take back control of a (small) part of the Internet.
Come to think of it, are there any noteworthy sites besides tumblr that let you customize web pages like those latter two screenshots? Say what you will about the aesthetic, it definitely has personality.
Joke’s on you… it never had a soul!
god i so wish that i could create my own colorful website, but html/css/javascript were always near impossible for me :( great article, thank you for sharing!
To be honest, the minimum you really need for a colourful website is just HTML and a dash of inline CSS, especially if you want to recreate that nostalgic early internet type of feeling. JavaScript is very much optional.
In my opinion you should start easy, understand how it all clicks together, especially HTML and then start building, and eventually rebuilding, on top of it after you have grasped the basics. Most people gets scared by HTML, CSS and JavaScript because they are usually presented together as if you couldn’t use one without the others, but you most certainly can.
Just my 2 cents.
Thank you for reading! There are great tutorials for beginners regarding html/css. Also you can also start with copying the html text of another site and modify it.
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