Damn, I miss those days. There were no big walled gardens, no Twitter or Facebook. If you had anything to say to anyone, you had to put together your own website. It was amazing.
I also created websites back in the day with spacer gifs and framesets, but I don't understand this qoute.
People still create their own website. There are still a lot of forums with a wide range of topics.
For example: not so long ago I was into reef tanks. There are a ton of forums and websites about that subject. Maybe even more than in the old days.
Far fewer than back in the late 90s and early 2000s. I think the reason for that is because people didn't actually want to make websites - they wanted to have a voice on the internet and making a website was pretty much the only way to do that. Now if you want to publish your ideas about reef tanks you could learn to write HTML and CSS and make a website, or you could write on Twitter, or you could make YouTube videos, or you could do a podcast, etc, etc.
There are fewer people making websites but there are more people publishing something on the web.
I think when the web industry's old guard lament the fact that no one really builds homepages any more it's genuine and heartfelt because they (and I include myself in this) really enjoyed looking at what people made. For me to see what interesting and exciting ideas people have that they can do with HTML and CSS is much harder now. There's Glitch and Codepen and stuff, but I feel like I'm still missing loads of the best stuff.
And it was great. It was a barrier of entry for speech. You could do it, it was free, but you had to apply some effort, you had to have something to say.
Now the Web is flooded with morons on Twitter who's opinion is just the noise you have to filter through.
Don’t over romanticize it. There were a lot of experiments, goofiness, and bad information in those days, too. It was also nearly impossible to find anything.
There was a beautiful period before Google was reverse bought by DoubleClick where you could find damn near anything. Searching was a solved problem by Inktomi and AltaVista but PageRank solved sorting search results (for a while).
Before Google AltaVista's search was pretty good at filtering out the meta tag spam that bubbled up in other search engines.
> beautiful period before Google was reverse bought by DoubleClick
That's a beautiful way to put it. I remember those days and thing is, much of Google's reputation was built during those days, a coattail they're still coasting on today.
In those days I remember you could find anything at all in just a moment. "Information snacking" was a thing, versus "being given the answer we think you want (or the one that will make us the most money)".
"Reverse bought by DoubleClick", will have to remember that..
My personal take on this, I think this quote stems largely from the fact that a lot of people funnel into their social media walled garden without second thoughts, and simply publish there. Without it, you have to self publish on what we know as a website. (Just think of it, what would you do if you have something to say but there are no social media behemoths)
Further, your audience was potentially everyone with a browser. You had full reign in your creativity, your means to style your page to your like was limitless, even if that meant 20 rotating gifs that took forever to load on dial up.
All the social media bubbles score low on self expression- I personally feel this is what is missed most on those platforms. Yes, even if some were butt ugly. :)
Myspace scored big on self expression and eventually that's what's killed it.
What's missing from the so called social medias is genuineness, when you have your own website you don't usually post crap there (well some ppl do shit where they eat but that's an exception).
Making your own website today is still possible, but the chances of people actually reading your content is really low unless you invest a lot of time into SEO. A large part of the browsing population never leaves their walled garden and only reads what's posted there. So unless you get crossposted into their filterbubble, your content is just invisible.
On the flip side, I was personally always venturing out into the Wild Wild Web to find new, interesting content. It had this sense of adventure that is pretty much gone nowadays
It's not the same. Those who create their own websites today do so by buying a domain and some equally cheap webspace.
Back then this was not an option, and we were glad to have sites like Geocities.
Many of us were kids or teens with no access to credit cards or PayPal, and the web was really new. The animated "under construction" GIFs served a purpose, and the topic we posted on felt different. As if it was for fun, saying "I'm here", instead of "Look at what a pro I am, what knowledge I have, book my time".
I also created websites back in the day with spacer gifs and framesets, but I don't understand this qoute.
People still create their own website. There are still a lot of forums with a wide range of topics.
For example: not so long ago I was into reef tanks. There are a ton of forums and websites about that subject. Maybe even more than in the old days.