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Here's a contrarian timeline: maybe the old web will return? My reasoning: when the "old web" was great, most people thought the internet was for nerds. Sure even casual users would forward funny emails to their friends, but when it came time for news most people would read the paper or watch the nightly broadcast. When they paid for their Big Mac they'd lay down cash. There were plenty of people using the internet, but again, they were nerds or nerd-adjacent. So, maybe the LLM-ification of everything could end up being like a huge filter, where all the non-nerds no longer see the point of anything and move on to gardens with even higher walls. And then what you have left will be a small subset of people who know how to reach their desired corners of the internet, just like before.
We're participating in it right now. HN is a living example of a simple website facilitating discussion between humans with a shared interest. That's why I come here more than any other news/social site now.
I don't believe the old web was filled with people pining about how the current web is awful and them participating in recreating the web they inhabit is better. People on the old web just posted things, because before that there was no non-old web to compare to. But that in itself is what makes the old web so appealing to people wanting it to return. Back then there was no other web necessary to escape from.
So when people construct versions of the old web today, they make a conscious decision to do something most people would not, and by doing so it sometimes comes off as indicating what they think of the other design decisions they chose not to make. It's not a bad thing, but it's not quite the same as it was anymore. That is why some of the spark is gone, in my eyes. It's kind of like counterculture being mistaken as the opposite of culture.
It is even more pronounced when people talk about "the old web" on old web websites all day.
I haven't checked it out personally, but this is my impression of all of the webs that aren't the world wide web. Like the meshtastics, the new freenet, some web 3.0
It being harder to join has the effect of their being a smaller more engaged user base. Less likely that there will be pressure from corporate interests, more likely that every user has a vested interest in both production and consumption.
edit: And of course, you'll see the same in dedicated niche forms and spaces like HAM radio. I imagine the folks TXing EME have a particular flavor that is well maintained.
> There were plenty of people using the internet, but again, they were nerds or nerd-adjacent. So, maybe the LLM-ification of everything could end up being like a huge filter, where all the non-nerds no longer see the point of anything and move on to gardens with even higher walls.
One difference I see is that in the (so-called) "old web" era, if you were not nerdy enough to navigate certain technical issues, the path of least resistance was to not participate. As you say, those people stuck to phone books and newspapers and TV. That meant that entering the world of the internet was adding something; you could still read the newspaper and watch TV (and most people did), but you had the internet also.
The insidious achievement of the Facebooks and TikToks of the world is to make things smooth enough and make participation widespread enough that nowadays its harder to not participate, somehow, in some facet of online interaction, than it is to participate. By doing that they created a flood of junky stuff, and now AI has come along to amplify that approach many times.
This means that now, what the nerds are trying to do is not to add, but to subtract. In the old web, you went to the web to get something you couldn't get from traditional media or communications. But now, if a "new old web" is created, it will largely be to not get things you are effectively being forced to get from the flood of social media and AI content. That doesn't mean it can't be done, and in a way I hope it is done, but it means it's going to have to be qualitatively different. Before, the walls kept you in and you hopped over to get out, but now we're all out in the wilderness, and if people build walls, it will be to keep the wild world out and keep yourself safe inside.
The old web relies on people thinking "I'm going to make a website about X" and following through, not relying on visitors, income, validation, etc.
> And then what you have left will be a small subset of people who know how to reach their desired corners of the internet, just like before.
Blue skies mentality. The old web was good because it wasn't crowded or accessible to most, and everything was new. That, great filter, was unique and will never happen again; Pandora's box is open and cannot be shut.
Pretty much akin to one's childhood being yearned at old age...
the article already lists one positive - the LLM assistance made the engineering effort to keep their site up and running feasible again. insofar as spam killed the remnants of old web, that is a promising sign.
Your misjudgement comes from not seeing the economic incentive here. The web as a surveillance mechanism is just way too juicy to let go. As of now, pretty much all economies depend on it, just from an economic numbers calculation.
Mind you, 200 years later, we still live in cities built for cars, not people. Rockefeller, Shell, BP and the like are still not dead, and still use everything they got to not go extinct while corrupting every politician that will accept their money. Just for a couple more years at a time, and a couple more, and a couple more...while destroying our planet like a cancer.
In 200 years we'll still have the web built for surveillance capitalism, not people.
There is no old web to go back to. Meanwhile state surveillance depends on its existence. Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, three letter agencies, Palantir, and now the AI companies depend on it, and they're selling to nation states at a time. Again, it's just too juicy not to.
Back then we called them trusts, but now those big tech companies are seemingly worth more than actual countries. That's too much power without legislation, as they can effectively abandon the rule of law. Remember what happened with the Enron scandal? That was about billions, not trillions.
If we want a human web again, we need to build a new one, with privacy and secrecy first and not as an afterthought. No CA, and with mutual cryptography that acts like both a ledger and as a privacy shield for the users. No cookies, no tracking, no degenerate google controlling it all through owning the source code.
I think the audience could absolutely shrink back to something resembling the old web. I'm less sure the old web itself comes back
Allow me to switch to asshole mode for a minute:
"Things used to be so good" is mostly rose-tinted glasses: What exactly WAS the "old web" anyway?
100s of half-baked sites hosted on Geocities, Yahoo, about pointless stuff? Epilepsy simulator websites splattered with gif-vomit? Everyone and their grandmother asking you to install their 10 toolbars?
Honest, serious question: What actually was of objective substance on the old internet that's nowhere to be found now?
You can find random pointless stuff now too, just that except Geocities/Yahoo it's Intsagram/TikTok/Twitter etc.
If you mean self-hosted websites, they're still here, and nothing's stopping you from creating your own.
If you loved all the Flash toons on Newgrounds etc there's unironically a lot more shorts and animations on YouTube or even Vimeo now, if you but search for them (the old gods like Weebl, David Firth are still there, and I suggest Sechi, DoodletmeGo, Nondescript Video Club, and からめる to start with then let the algorithm soak up the weirdness)
Just as the "internet" supplanted newspapers, magazines, and broadcast television for many people,
and how the newspapers replaced the town criers before them,
why shouldn't the "internet" be supplanted by a more accessible medium?
There's so much crap on the "old" and "middle age" internet: ads, scams, anal mods, trolls, bandwagons, vote wars, low-effort content and other repetitive noise that could be bypassed by just asking AI about something and make better use of your limited mortal lifetime, like watching that anime you've been putting off for years.
I'd define it as the web until the time that Facebook truly took off and conquered the hearts and minds of so many (that was the first huge shot in the losing war of the old web). For example, a key part of the old web was what used to be called the "blogosphere", and the blog's height was those final years before FB (in the ascendancy) and the first years of the FB era (descendancy).
For me the new web came about when if you wanted a website, you hired a web developer. As soon as it become DIY, without your own domain and didn't involve looking at HTML, the new web was born.
Today, if you own your own domain and fiddle with HTML then basically you're still part of the old web.
So basically, the old web required experts to help people get online, the new web negated them through homogenization.
The real experts from the old web basically became startup founders to monetize the homogenization and automation of their worldviews for the less tech-savvy (or specialized) folks.
People pine for the old web, but it was a churning, friggin' mess too. Search results were good though, but only when Google arrived. The standardization and ease-of-use from the new web has been a massive boon. I think things will change as people yearn for a wild-west, where there are new opportunities. The promise of a better life, seeing that the grass is greener, avoiding pain - those things always create golden ages.
Once AI favours people who can afford to pay for the best results.. or surveillance becomes too burdensome or dangerous, then watch this space.
The spirit of freedom always runs into trouble, when considering the notion of:
"Cut off the heads of others to make oneself appear taller."
Surveillance enables this. Decentralize again, but how?
ISPs - help or hindrance? Why/how can ISP charges be diverted to content creators?
I agree with you. When I was a freshman, the school paper assigned me to cover a professor talking about the blogosphere. That was a year before Facebook released its newsfeed. My story did not age well.
https://gwhatchet.com/2005/10/13/professor-describes-influen...
2009-2014? That's not the old web. Or I'm old. Take your pick.
Yeah, I'd say "old web" is early '90s up through about mid-2000s or so. Geocities, Tripod, Angelfire, lots of standalone web forums, the early blogosphere, no social media, etc.
‘09-‘14 is hilariously not the “old web.” With that said, those of us who participated in what I consider the “old web” are likely “old” now, so… shrug?
Two of my favorite sites [0][1] still online—Lurkers Guide to Babylon 5 and ex-astris-scientia—were started in ‘92 and ‘98 respectively.
Elegant content for a more civilized age.
I've just gotten used to this at this point. My first time on the web was somewhere around 1995 I think, although my first time on the Internet was earlier (it was a proxy through some ancient BBS and I'm pretty sure it was using gopher). Even though I was just a kid back then, clearly that makes me old now.
My first grandchild was born in 2000. And the COBOL panic for Y2K is probably partly my fault because 4 characters were too computational expensive when I wrote code that probably still powers your Igloo ice containers and GEICO insurance policies. 80's tech still persists!
I would posit that "old web" could be defined as the period before Google Search became public (<~1997).
But maybe that's more a measure of my own age and perceptions rather than an accurate representation of the various eras of the internet/web...
Am I getting old? 09-14 is not even close to the old web for me. The old web, to me, was back when people still published physical 'phone' books for websites.
Remember the good ol' days when we all thought that everything on the web would exist for eternity and over.
Webpages dying is probably one of the biggest design flaws of the original web.
I am not saying old content needs to be preserved forever, but so much content has factually been lost over time. Old logs from text-based MUDs for instance, even for MUDs that still exist today.
Quite ironic that a link shortener which went offline for a decade or so is now posting about other sites not staying online.
0.mk, you had one job…
What I find really interesting is that people can heavily disagree what and when the old internet was. It may have ended anywhere from 1989 to 2023, brought by the introduction of the www, mass accessibility, social media, or Ai.
For me, this doesn't indicate that those young folks don't know what they are talking about. Rather, that missing the "old web" is more a cultural thing in itself. We got introduced to the web and discovered these communities we became part of, but something changed and our community died.
There had to be a cutoff that changed something! That killed our community. In reality the change, destruction of communities happened all the time. Some survived, some changed that returning to them wouldn't feel the same, some moved. If you don't feel part of that community anymore, it is destroyed, even if someone else thinks it is still alive and just moved to new-forum/teanspeak3/dig/reddit/discord/tumblr/facebook/tiktok/next thing.
The small Ultima online private server I used to be part of died, because a few people moved on with life, even though it was still there for a long time. Not because of WoW. My WoW guild suffered the same fate, despite Wow still being there. Now the few people I became close friends with are still left, wearing the guild name as a server name on discord, but that's a very different community.
Even if the exact people suddenly came back, it wouldn't be my community anymore.
My old web can't come back, because it is not a matter of technology.
I am sure the people that join the web today will lament the death of the old web of today in a decade.
When I think of "old web", I always think of "Britney Spears' Guide to
Semiconductor Physics". Thankfully, it still lives:
The blog mentions "0.mk's revenue did not cover hosting" but then goes on to implement expensive AI integration. Not counting cost for tokens to do the development.
Also:
> Reply to any 0.mk email and the message lands in a feedback queue the AI reads, triages, and acts on
Is this dangerous? What about jailbreaking AIs and having it delete everyone's account?
It seems putting anything on the web that allows submit is screaming to get spammed these days. Is there any sort of spam filter that's worth using?
The interesting number here isn't 76.7% dead, it's that 23.3% alive is an upper bound. A server answering HTTP doesn't mean the thing somebody shared in 2011 still exists
100% AI generated text. The irony.
Purevolume mention made me sad. I miss that community.
Old web was more vulnerable because people didn't know many things. Nowadays, everyone is using AI, and you often don't know whether the person you're talking to is a human or an AI. For a normal, non-technical user, the internet is no longer a completely safe place.
Websites always have been shopping windows. They change with the seasons, they come and go. The idea that websites are forever and archived like newspapers might be laudable, but it really applies only to… online newspapers.
The cruelest version of this is the page that survives while everything it links to dies. Looks alive, leads nowhere.
Site got hugged? Is there a torrent?
"The old web" is 1993 to 2007. It's all been downhill ever since.
Wow, that is a great domain!
I was wondering what happened to the old web too
Not enough links
I found an old database backup of 0.mk on a disk I had kept.
0.mk started in 2009 as a passion project built by three of us. We worked on it for a few hours each week around our regular jobs. We eventually closed it in 2014 because the revenue (hint: no revenue) could not cover hosting, development, and the constant work of fighting spam and reviewing abuse.
The recovered historical corpus contains 657,607 links. For this analysis, we followed every one of them.
Of the 655,178 links with safe, crawlable targets, 76.7% no longer returned a loading page. After removing repeated destinations, 78.7% of the 492,620 distinct crawlable URLs still did not load. So duplicate links are not creating the result.
I use “did not load” rather than “gone” deliberately. Some URLs returned 403 or 429 and may have blocked the crawler. Pages that returned 2xx or 3xx count as loading even when they now lead to parked domains, login walls, or removed-content notices.
There is one large distortion in the yearly data. A single account created 83,398 URLs pointing to one hostname in 2011. At URL level, 92.5% of that year did not load. Count each hostname once and the result becomes 61.7%, almost identical to 2010 and 2012.
A few things I did not expect:
- 835 restored links point at Facebook’s old photo CDN. None loaded. - The first link ever shortened was a CSS stylesheet on a WordPress blog. - Someone shortened localhost on the second day. - The longest stored URL is 38,753 characters and repeatedly says TRYING_THE_MAXIMUM_URL.
Most users came from one regional online community, so this is not a census of the whole web. It is a record of what that community shared between 2009 and 2014.
I brought 0.mk back to test whether AI can now handle enough development, spam filtering, abuse review, monitoring, and support to make the service sustainable where the original economics failed.
Happy to answer questions about the crawl, the old data, or the rebuild.
Fun experiment:
Have an LLM “guess” random URLs seeded with words from a dictionary, iterating over each word and guessing a URL.
It guesses a lot of correct URLs. This is one method of “URL hunting” that doesn’t involve a 3rd party list or index.
Then just scan those pages for other URLs, visit them, and add a tally every time you come across a URL (for page rank).
Then search anything, see what the results are. You have invented a dark web search engine.
'URL shortening was a fucking awful idea'
[1] https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/URLTeam#cite_note-1 [2] https://lwn.net/Articles/683880/
Old web was kind of dumb anyway. You can put on the rose tinted glasses and feel elite about browsing some shitty site 20 years ago or enjoy the fruits of modern design.