Yeah, as I said in most way things are better now than they were in the rose-tinted memories of the late 90's and early 2000's. Now if you want to say something on the internet, you can open up a Substack, or a Bluesky, or a Medium, or you can find a niche Subreddit. You don't need to know anything very technical, and that's a good thing.
I'll acknowledge that the old web was ugly, even at the time. I guess I just liked how much of it was, for lack of a better word, "custom". Most people were pretty bad at HTML, common web standards really hadn't caught out outside of "make it work in Internet Explorer", and CSS really hadn't caught on, so people glued together websites the best that they could.
Most websites looked pretty bad, but they were genuine. They didn't feel like some corporation built them, they felt like they were made by actual humans, and a lot of the time, actual children. I was one of those children.
I posted about this a week ago [1], but my first foray into programming was making crappy websites. It felt cool to me that a nine year old could make and publish a website, just like the grownups could. I didn't know anything about style so I had bright green backgrounds and used marquee tags and blink tags and I believe I had a midi of the X-files theme song playing in the background.
I guess it's the same sentimentality that I have when I look at a child's terrible drawing or reading one of my old terrible essays I wrote when I was eleven years old that my mom kept around. They're bad, they're embarrassing, but they're also kind of charming.
> Yeah, as I said in most way things are better now than they were in the rose-tinted memories of the late 90's and early 2000's. Now if you want to say something on the internet, you can open up a Substack, or a Bluesky, or a Medium, or you can find a niche Subreddit. You don't need to know anything very technical, and that's a good thing.
By 1999 you could create a LiveJournal or find a niche forum through Google. You didn't need to know anything very technical.
You could, Xanga as well, but it was still less connected. People complain about recommendation systems on YouTube and Facebook and Reddit, but one thing that they do well is give people more reach that they probably wouldn't have gotten before.
I've found so many interesting YouTube videos from people that I haven't ever heard of, just because of YouTube recommending them to me. Stuff like that didn't really exist for quite awhile; for a long time the best you had was aggregator sites like ThatGuyWithTheGlasses.com or similar sites.
I'll acknowledge that the old web was ugly, even at the time. I guess I just liked how much of it was, for lack of a better word, "custom". Most people were pretty bad at HTML, common web standards really hadn't caught out outside of "make it work in Internet Explorer", and CSS really hadn't caught on, so people glued together websites the best that they could.
Most websites looked pretty bad, but they were genuine. They didn't feel like some corporation built them, they felt like they were made by actual humans, and a lot of the time, actual children. I was one of those children.
I posted about this a week ago [1], but my first foray into programming was making crappy websites. It felt cool to me that a nine year old could make and publish a website, just like the grownups could. I didn't know anything about style so I had bright green backgrounds and used marquee tags and blink tags and I believe I had a midi of the X-files theme song playing in the background.
I guess it's the same sentimentality that I have when I look at a child's terrible drawing or reading one of my old terrible essays I wrote when I was eleven years old that my mom kept around. They're bad, they're embarrassing, but they're also kind of charming.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43297104