Good observations. Though obviously a large part of what happened is normies and women (I repeat myself) crowded the place. I guess you could say “containerization” enabled this.
Flashbacks to my friend’s personal website:
A number of essays/rants calling for radical libertarianism (I guess we would call him an ancap now).
A guide to how to breed the Golden Chocobo on FF7 (along with a surprisingly long rant about how bad all the other guides are on this topic).
A list of his objections to the backstory behind Shadowrun, along with his personal changes.
And a sticker that said “This website created 100% with Notepad”
IIRC it was all lime green text on a black background.
I have profound respect for the bloggers who never left their original space from decades ago, and still chug away with the same hilariously outdated format. They're basically saying, f*ck you new guys, I was here first. And they still get a solid following to this day.
Sooo... Technology progresses, and we whine about that? Have you considered that the web was actually worse back then and it is nostalgia that makes you feel it is better?
I am not _very_ old, but I am old enough to remember text-based roleplay on individual servers instead of aggregators like Discord and Telegram. And you know what? The aggregators... just work better. They have their own quirks, but so did each and every of those old sites; meanwhile, the chance that they die under you are essentially zero.
If you all want to take part in a sort of return to the glorious days of the old web, try neocities.org. It's based on GeoCities (remember that?!). It still has the same old-school anarchic feel. You can find anything there—including my own website (check my profile if you care, which you don't).
But you (the people reading this) won't do that, because everything is commercialised nowadays. The people who would previously have made interesting, unique personal websites, available to anyone, now make Substacks in the hope they can turn paid subscriptions on and monetise them. 𝕏itter has been ruined by monetisation too, as have other sites.
If you care about this issue, take a stand. Even if you won't make your own website on NeoCities or elsewhere, you can do something. Refuse to monetise your 𝕏itter account. Refuse to turn on Substack paid subscriptions. Resist! Resist!
I think there was a language change somewhere along the line, we went from being 'customers' to being 'users' and like I always say "customer service is dead." Now we are commodified numbers that tell a website owner they have done their job well enough to earn a click. It's no wonder AI art has had such a huge hayday recently, why not spend 30secs making your 'art' if it's just going to be scrolled past anyway...
I also hate paywalling but that's a matter for another time.
It seems like you’re more bothered by consistent formatting than by consolidation?
Like, it’s reasonable to say the book publishing industry has gotten too concentrated, or that editors are reluctant to buy books outside of narrow genre conventions or political norms.
But this reads more like you’re complaining that publishers won’t buy a book with triangular pages, or printed in invisible ink, or in the form of 20 parchment scrolls. While it’s not *inherently* bad to experiment, there’s a reason the basic form of the book hasn’t much changed in 2000 years - it works, and it allows for nearly any content without the format getting in the way.
In terms of web design, the main advantage of early Facebook over MySpace was the consistency in format, because it turns out most people are absolutely godawful at web design, and even those who aren’t usually view it as secondary to the actual message they want to get across. More recently, I think this is a major reason that Substack has displaced WordPress.
Certainly most people doing their own web design are bad at it, but that's okay. And I'm not talking about publishers' preferences here, the whole point of the web is everyone is self-published. Or at least that obtained until centralized aggregators.
I think preferring the bland style of Facebook is a legitimate aesthetic preference, just not one I share.
Honestly, I would not mind containerization so much. If only the containers supported multiple lateral column vertical. In that damned low-info hellscape of 2025, you can't properly see more than three separate things without scrolling.
I got a 4k monitor. Why can't I see twenty things at once, see whether something catches my fancy and if not, press one button and see twenty new things?!
Related to the containerization (and downstream of it, or maybe it was intentionally upstream from the big aggregators POV, not sure): containerization meant that you could standardize what data was out there, which unfortunately meant that the big aggros were able to find out far too much about us.
This definitely happened with movies...My dad spent the 90's and early 2000's lovingly building up a DVD library of Hong Kong movies, which now sit unused against one wall of my mom's house. Having to come to terms with the realization that some good experiences are gone forever, like the party after the mammoth hunt, tears in rain, etc.
I read an essay of Lanier's where he said he wasn't too worried about AIs turning into Cthulhu, just that they would be used for crappy scams and exploitation, which seems on target.
The death of physical media is especially interesting because in one sense it didn’t happen, you can still buy blu-rays and DVDs and players for them. But in another sense it is clearly happening and leads to many lesser-known works being consigned to the dustbin of history and never watched. And it’s exactly the same dynamic I’m discussing here: sure lots of websites exist, but if they aren’t talked about on twitter they may as well not. Same with films and the streaming services.
Yeah...I guess I'd partly chalk it up to our own laziness (certainly I'm guilty of watching stuff on streaming instead of using a DVD player, I've forgotten how to write HTML and so on) but it doesn't help that devices no longer come with CD burners and stuff like that.
I have a friend with whom I share interesting websites. A majority of them are old or very nice. I do miss the days when you could really tinker with the HTML/CSS of your pages.
I remember in Highschool in the 90’s I would log onto the internet every Wednesday evening to check the forums, and web comics and science fiction writers web pages I kept track of…. I only logged in once a week back then.
I miss forums. Every message board was ostensibly dedicated to a band or video game, and conversation took place on those topics, but my favorite section was always the miscellaneous board where a small number of personalities shared jokes and talked about their lives. Nothing approximates that anymore. Facebook and instagram is perfectly curated. Twitter connects you to very interesting people, but you are relegated to reply guy status until you can break out as a niche micro celebrity. Reddit comes the closest, but outside of smaller subreddits there are too many people to get to know any other poster.
Also, the 2006 Facebook design is more aesthetically pleasing to me than today’s modern design.
The counter point to this is that when I had my own website I spent too much time fiddling with how it looked and presented than with the actual message (ugh, should I write "content"?) and the overall effort suffered for my having done so. But I agree.
“You can’t present the content the way you choose, the aggregator chooses for you. You can’t use the colors or the fonts or layout you might want, the aggregator chooses for you.”
One thing I really appreciate about Substack is that you can customize a lot of your main page. Maybe it’s not radical customization, and it doesn’t seem to do anything on mobile, but I still appreciate that we have something
Substack is for sure a lot better than the typical social media site. But the editor they provide really does squeeze all content you publish here down into the same basic design language. If you want to do something really wacky or experimental with layout you're out of luck.
Good observations. Though obviously a large part of what happened is normies and women (I repeat myself) crowded the place. I guess you could say “containerization” enabled this.
Flashbacks to my friend’s personal website:
A number of essays/rants calling for radical libertarianism (I guess we would call him an ancap now).
A guide to how to breed the Golden Chocobo on FF7 (along with a surprisingly long rant about how bad all the other guides are on this topic).
A list of his objections to the backstory behind Shadowrun, along with his personal changes.
And a sticker that said “This website created 100% with Notepad”
IIRC it was all lime green text on a black background.
This is how I remember the early Internet.
I have profound respect for the bloggers who never left their original space from decades ago, and still chug away with the same hilariously outdated format. They're basically saying, f*ck you new guys, I was here first. And they still get a solid following to this day.
What does it even mean for a website design to be “outdated”? If it works, it works.
As the man famously said: “This is a motherf*cking website”
https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/
The same thing it means for a kitchen to be outdated. It's mostly aesthetics but also a matter of functionality and expected feature set.
Sooo... Technology progresses, and we whine about that? Have you considered that the web was actually worse back then and it is nostalgia that makes you feel it is better?
I am not _very_ old, but I am old enough to remember text-based roleplay on individual servers instead of aggregators like Discord and Telegram. And you know what? The aggregators... just work better. They have their own quirks, but so did each and every of those old sites; meanwhile, the chance that they die under you are essentially zero.
Things were better when they were worse though
In what way?
If you all want to take part in a sort of return to the glorious days of the old web, try neocities.org. It's based on GeoCities (remember that?!). It still has the same old-school anarchic feel. You can find anything there—including my own website (check my profile if you care, which you don't).
But you (the people reading this) won't do that, because everything is commercialised nowadays. The people who would previously have made interesting, unique personal websites, available to anyone, now make Substacks in the hope they can turn paid subscriptions on and monetise them. 𝕏itter has been ruined by monetisation too, as have other sites.
If you care about this issue, take a stand. Even if you won't make your own website on NeoCities or elsewhere, you can do something. Refuse to monetise your 𝕏itter account. Refuse to turn on Substack paid subscriptions. Resist! Resist!
And walk away from literally dozens of dollars annually? OK Mr. Moneybags
a tiny silver lining is that on the rare occasion one finds an actual website, it's really exciting
Find any good ones lately?
All the ones I can think of are one-trick ponies, just a cool widget or infographic in the middle of the page, no ongoing updates.
just a couple of places that sell tools https://lascodiamond.com/ and http://cdcotools.com incredible late 90s aesthetic, just perfect
I think there was a language change somewhere along the line, we went from being 'customers' to being 'users' and like I always say "customer service is dead." Now we are commodified numbers that tell a website owner they have done their job well enough to earn a click. It's no wonder AI art has had such a huge hayday recently, why not spend 30secs making your 'art' if it's just going to be scrolled past anyway...
I also hate paywalling but that's a matter for another time.
It seems like you’re more bothered by consistent formatting than by consolidation?
Like, it’s reasonable to say the book publishing industry has gotten too concentrated, or that editors are reluctant to buy books outside of narrow genre conventions or political norms.
But this reads more like you’re complaining that publishers won’t buy a book with triangular pages, or printed in invisible ink, or in the form of 20 parchment scrolls. While it’s not *inherently* bad to experiment, there’s a reason the basic form of the book hasn’t much changed in 2000 years - it works, and it allows for nearly any content without the format getting in the way.
In terms of web design, the main advantage of early Facebook over MySpace was the consistency in format, because it turns out most people are absolutely godawful at web design, and even those who aren’t usually view it as secondary to the actual message they want to get across. More recently, I think this is a major reason that Substack has displaced WordPress.
Certainly most people doing their own web design are bad at it, but that's okay. And I'm not talking about publishers' preferences here, the whole point of the web is everyone is self-published. Or at least that obtained until centralized aggregators.
I think preferring the bland style of Facebook is a legitimate aesthetic preference, just not one I share.
Honestly, I would not mind containerization so much. If only the containers supported multiple lateral column vertical. In that damned low-info hellscape of 2025, you can't properly see more than three separate things without scrolling.
I got a 4k monitor. Why can't I see twenty things at once, see whether something catches my fancy and if not, press one button and see twenty new things?!
Related to the containerization (and downstream of it, or maybe it was intentionally upstream from the big aggregators POV, not sure): containerization meant that you could standardize what data was out there, which unfortunately meant that the big aggros were able to find out far too much about us.
This definitely happened with movies...My dad spent the 90's and early 2000's lovingly building up a DVD library of Hong Kong movies, which now sit unused against one wall of my mom's house. Having to come to terms with the realization that some good experiences are gone forever, like the party after the mammoth hunt, tears in rain, etc.
I read an essay of Lanier's where he said he wasn't too worried about AIs turning into Cthulhu, just that they would be used for crappy scams and exploitation, which seems on target.
The death of physical media is especially interesting because in one sense it didn’t happen, you can still buy blu-rays and DVDs and players for them. But in another sense it is clearly happening and leads to many lesser-known works being consigned to the dustbin of history and never watched. And it’s exactly the same dynamic I’m discussing here: sure lots of websites exist, but if they aren’t talked about on twitter they may as well not. Same with films and the streaming services.
Yeah...I guess I'd partly chalk it up to our own laziness (certainly I'm guilty of watching stuff on streaming instead of using a DVD player, I've forgotten how to write HTML and so on) but it doesn't help that devices no longer come with CD burners and stuff like that.
Hey Kitten! Did you turn off the audio version of your post on purpose? Usually they are available
I didn't think so, I'll see if something changed
Looks like this happened for several other Substack authors I read regularly, so perhaps a change to default settings?
I have a friend with whom I share interesting websites. A majority of them are old or very nice. I do miss the days when you could really tinker with the HTML/CSS of your pages.
I remember in Highschool in the 90’s I would log onto the internet every Wednesday evening to check the forums, and web comics and science fiction writers web pages I kept track of…. I only logged in once a week back then.
I miss forums. Every message board was ostensibly dedicated to a band or video game, and conversation took place on those topics, but my favorite section was always the miscellaneous board where a small number of personalities shared jokes and talked about their lives. Nothing approximates that anymore. Facebook and instagram is perfectly curated. Twitter connects you to very interesting people, but you are relegated to reply guy status until you can break out as a niche micro celebrity. Reddit comes the closest, but outside of smaller subreddits there are too many people to get to know any other poster.
Also, the 2006 Facebook design is more aesthetically pleasing to me than today’s modern design.
The forums are still around, but I think only lunatics populate them these days.
I have found Twitter to be good for meeting interesting people, but then again I am a niche micro celebrity there
The counter point to this is that when I had my own website I spent too much time fiddling with how it looked and presented than with the actual message (ugh, should I write "content"?) and the overall effort suffered for my having done so. But I agree.
“You can’t present the content the way you choose, the aggregator chooses for you. You can’t use the colors or the fonts or layout you might want, the aggregator chooses for you.”
One thing I really appreciate about Substack is that you can customize a lot of your main page. Maybe it’s not radical customization, and it doesn’t seem to do anything on mobile, but I still appreciate that we have something
Substack is for sure a lot better than the typical social media site. But the editor they provide really does squeeze all content you publish here down into the same basic design language. If you want to do something really wacky or experimental with layout you're out of luck.
What are the names of these essays? I tried looking them up, but I can’t find anything written after the release of GPT-2.