"But the early web wasn’t fun in many conventional ways - you couldn’t quite create art there, or use it as much more than a way of sharing documents."
This person needs to go look at some Geocities archives. People were trying to create cool-looking pages as soon as we had the IMG tag. People were using tables to organize a bunch of images in neat ways. People were doing weird little hypertext art things.
They were not using the technology in the "right" way. Nobody gave a shit about the right way. It took something like twenty fucking years for CSS to make it easy to vertically center shit the "right" way after persuading everyone that using tables for anything but tabular data was "wrong". If we waved a magic wand and suddenly everyone just had this theoretical Markdown-centric browser? People would immediately start looking for clever ways to abuse edge cases of its implementation to make their pages pretty. And people would start making enhancement requests, some of which the browser makers would inevitably implement, and... eventually we're right back where we are now.
I am not a fan of the modern corporate-dominated web, neither am I a fan of the modern world where more and more apps are horrible kludges of JS and HTML that have absolutely no care about the UI conventions of their host platforms, and are a couple orders of magnitude more resource-hungry than their equivalents that use native widgets and compiled languages. (Concrete example: Slack's 440 megs on disc, Discord's 370; Ripcord, a native app that talks to them both, is 40.) But thinking people will happily go back to a world with little to no control of the presentation layer after decades of struggle for more of that is a pipe dream. We all quit using Gopher the moment we had a web browser on our systems.
It's a beautiful thing. I remember the days you speak of. I also remember the leaps and bounds people took to bend myspace to their will. All for expression. It's been a beautiful and very human journey
I'm not sure we would have gotten where we are now without those limitations for people to conquer.
There's nothing in http that requires a browser. We could have released multiple app platforms by now. But there's a magic in html, css, and js that is taken completely for granted. I remain a fan.
...Edit to add that we have added these platforms. And they can't come close to what we have on the web.
Roku, Apple TV, Nvidia Shield. These are application platforms. And they're ok for what they are. Android and IOS are the most successful connected platforms we have, and they're impressive, but I still spend more time in my browser than anything else on my mobile device.
still not easy to vertically center shit, especially variable sized shit. don't forget <marquee> and finding ways to make text blink. and gaudy section separators. AND MUSIC. when you went to my geocities app you got the 'low ride er' mariachi theme. that was sweet. pissed off all of the kids in my class while i was developing it though because it would only get through the first few seconds before i was making changes.
> thinking people will go back to a world
it's not even going back. the main portal to the web is now apps on phones. the web will continue to evolve, but i can't imagine a scenario where it forks.
the anarcho liberal wild west days of the web are behind it, unfortunately. i lament its passing along with a whole host of others who grew up in the land of bbs, usenet, and the like.
I share your views on the topic. Early days of web were amazing from the perspective of people trying to express themselves despite the technological limitations. <img> and animated gifs, tables, CSS, not to mention Flash... Obviously romanticizing to an extent, but to me personally there was value in people striving to set their content and themselves apart - vs today when it's so much about "streamlining" experiences and conforming to current trends.
There is a fundamental conflict in human nature between the need for freedom of expression and need for structure - and a balance to be found. The latter won in Facebook vs MySpace, and while I liked the clean UI and structure to content that Facebook brought, today I would very much prefer to again see chaos of people's expression in MySpace pages than chaos of bland, ad-riddled, and structurally overpopulated Facebook profiles.
But in what I said above, the shift is actually between something else entirely - from web being individual, to being corporate. It seems to me that we got to where we are on the web solely because of hyper-capitalism seeping into it, like into all other pores of society. There is a string of reasons Slack is 440MB - it starts with it being pushed to use a combination of technologies that are deemed to ensure quickest iteration, time-to-market, interoperability with user tracking systems etc (in this case, Electron / JS for multi-platform coverage etc); then you have more and more people using those technologies because they are sought after; then companies want to use those technologies even more everywhere because it means you can grow your teams faster on the market. Btw, all exactly the same reasons as to why almost every "website" today is a React app. All the while, the more information you can collect on people, the more attractive you are, even if you have absolutely no need for it or way of using it in your product for now - so almost every website also comes with 50+ XHRs on load to every imaginable tracking service. All in function of marked words above - "growth", "market", "faster", "user tracking" since those are the ones that are exclusively rewarded (not even with actual money any more - with market evaluation and other perversed and illusory constructs).
So it's not the technologies or the "web" themselves that are the problem at all - it's that hyper-capitalism hijacks them, requires targeting widest market, being quick to monetize on it in any way etc - which means experimentation and individual expression lose value, and any benefits for the user that don't obviously result in benefits for the corporation (e.g. user's disk space usage for banal Slack example) are cut off from consideration. It's only expected then that, when you look from individual perspective, the web is not individual-friendly anymore.
(The)Facebook used a sneaky trick to create scarcity by requiring you have an educational email address. It was an elite club, compared to the normies who had to use MySpace.
The force of FOMO that built up behind that wall, once removed, flooded the population.
You can say it was their style or whatever, but I think it was that one move.
It's an intentional design choice on the part of the author to only attract a certain kind of user (the kind that cares about information and nothing else) who likely conforms to pg's ideal culture fit of a 'good hacker,' and scare away everyone else.
This person needs to go look at some Geocities archives. People were trying to create cool-looking pages as soon as we had the IMG tag. People were using tables to organize a bunch of images in neat ways. People were doing weird little hypertext art things.
They were not using the technology in the "right" way. Nobody gave a shit about the right way. It took something like twenty fucking years for CSS to make it easy to vertically center shit the "right" way after persuading everyone that using tables for anything but tabular data was "wrong". If we waved a magic wand and suddenly everyone just had this theoretical Markdown-centric browser? People would immediately start looking for clever ways to abuse edge cases of its implementation to make their pages pretty. And people would start making enhancement requests, some of which the browser makers would inevitably implement, and... eventually we're right back where we are now.
I am not a fan of the modern corporate-dominated web, neither am I a fan of the modern world where more and more apps are horrible kludges of JS and HTML that have absolutely no care about the UI conventions of their host platforms, and are a couple orders of magnitude more resource-hungry than their equivalents that use native widgets and compiled languages. (Concrete example: Slack's 440 megs on disc, Discord's 370; Ripcord, a native app that talks to them both, is 40.) But thinking people will happily go back to a world with little to no control of the presentation layer after decades of struggle for more of that is a pipe dream. We all quit using Gopher the moment we had a web browser on our systems.