[nunez]

If this were true, SquareSpace would be trading way higher than they are now, Twitter wouldn't exist, and Facebook would look a lot like MySpace.

My take: people created websites back then because there was no other choice. People RUSHED into MySpace when it got hot partly because of this.

Many people don't care about web culture; they only care about consuming. Just like many people don't become screenwriters or directors because they love TV or movies (though this is definitely a bigger pipeline than tech); they just want The Avengers or Real Housewives or whatever.

I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing. Most people have non-computery interests, and that's fine.

[nirimda]

> Many people don't care about web culture; they only care about consuming.

Strong disagree. People want to participate, they want to be part of a conversation. When you "consume" content on Facebook or Twitter, you can produce content and reasonably expect to get an audience - because you know there's other people there.

If you have your own personal website, you have no natural audience. If you're lucky, Google might like it and return it. But chances are, it won't thanks to SEO. And even if you do, you don't have any replies. A voice shouting into a void, signifying nothing. At that point, you need a blogging engine that allows for replies, and now you're in the world of off-the-shelf solutions. Not so far from Facebook or MySpace, which gets you your audience.

[mym1990]

People want to mindlessly scroll, a very low energy form of participation. At the end of the day, a very very small percentage of the users are creating content on a regular basis. You can't ignore the things that you give up by opting into a mass scale product, privacy, security, etc...

With a personal website, everything does become harder, but it ends up being your space and only your space. We've become accustomed to going viral and now no one can settle for having 50 consistent readers because that just seems so insignificant.

[mikae1]

> People want to mindlessly scroll, a very low energy form of participation.

If you ask 1000 people that have been mindlessly scrolling for the past 3 hours if they wish they'd done something else, I'm guessing most of them would say yes.

[_aavaa_]

And yet they scrolled, and not for lack of other options

[deafpolygon]

The reason for that is one of my favorite words: Inertia.

[mikae1]

So, what is your explanation?

[dimkorf]

> People want to participate, they want to be part of a conversation.

Are you potentially speaking for a vocal minority here that wants to be part of a conversation while ignoring the many than simply read (consume)?

[adql]

Well, there is a reason most sites nowadays have comment section. The readers also read comments, even if they might only add to them rarely

[mattarm]

Leaving comments is a different kind of participation than curating a personal website. The assertion originally under discussion here (a few posts back) is that most people don't care to curate their own personal website, or, really, any sort of distinguished online identity. I think that is true. Most people are on Facebook/Instagram/Nextdoor/whatever are doom scrolling it, not trying to become an influencer. The assortment of people leaving comments on NYT, Amazon reviews, or chattering on a forum somewhere, or whatever else, are doing just that, but not trying to drive traffic to their personal home page.

[sharemywin]

I don't think people do one thing. sometimes the read sometimes they like and sometimes they comment.

[amendegree]

Back when there was a lot of push back against a certain CEO redditors didn't like, that CEO noted that the ratio of commenters:viewers was like 1:1000. I personally know many people who created reddit accounts only because they were forced to by the app, but still have never posted a comment or even upvoted something (intentionally).

[michaelbrave]

I think it's closer to "people are willing to sacrifice some culture for convenience, until it destroys all the culture"

I think we are reaching the point where it's been hollowed out enough that there is finally showing some pushback against it, many asking if the convenience or access to audience is still worth the cultural sacrifices we give for it.

That said the demographics of most things are ballpark <10% produce content, <20% interact with content or comment and the rest >70% just consume content, and this seems to be roughly true ranging from websites to video games (change interact to multiplayer and produce to things like YouTubers or Bloggers about it)

[fknorangesite]

> People want to participate, they want to be part of a conversation.

No, most of them don't:

> the 1% rule is a general rule of thumb pertaining to participation in an internet community, stating that only 1% of the users of a website actively create new content, while the other 99% of the participants only lurk.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule

[nirimda]

The page you linked directly contradicts your interpretation:

> The 1% rule is often misunderstood to apply to the Internet in general, but it applies more specifically to any given Internet community. It is for this reason that one can see evidence for the 1% principle on many websites, but aggregated together one can see a different distribution. This latter distribution is still unknown and likely to shift, but various researchers and pundits have speculated on how to characterize the sum total of participation. Research in late 2012 suggested that only 23% of the population (rather than 90 percent) could properly be classified as lurkers, while 17% of the population could be classified as intense contributors of content.[9] Several years prior, results were reported on a sample of students from Chicago where 60 percent of the sample created content in some form.

This sort of "1% rule" claim, and other versions of it made by others who have replied, is not a possible counterargument to my claim. Moreover, behavior isn't the same as desire. It's ridiculous to say that Trump didn't want a second term as president just because he didn't get one, and it's not less ridiculous to say that a person doesn't want to post content on the internet just because they didn't post content on your website.

But more fundamentally it goes nowhere towards the "be part of a conversation" bit. "People want to participate, they want to be part of a conversation" means that, while it is true of people in general, it is truer of people who post content. The people who post content want dialogue, so they're going to post where they can get feedback. They don't want to just speak into a void. The rest of my comment can only have made sense if it was a general truth and its application to those who actually create internet content (even just a small throwaway comment like this).

Your kind of argument simply doesn't explain the death of the private website and the growth of social networks. It also doesn't explain why what grew up is interactive networks, not news aggregators.

[nunez]

I think you are partially right, but I also think that people are willing to participate as long as it's low effort relative to their consumption or the expected value warrants investing more effort (i.e. why many teens want to be influencers).

Adding a heart reaction to an Instagram post is much easier than creating that Instagram post, though Instagram has made this very easy to do as well, which is easier still than creating a YouTube video, which is easier than updating a web page on SquareSpace.

I think this is why Reddit is mostly lurkers.

[Affric]

Good comment. And the old web is still there but for almost 30 years it’s not been where the growth is.

99% of people don’t want computers, they want computers to do the work of life for them so they can get on with what really interest them.

[nunez]

thanks! agreed.

browsers can still talk HTTP/0.9 and HTTP/1.0 (though they largely don't want to, for good reasons) and HTML still works! i loved (LOVED) the old Internet, but time has moved on.

that said, Hugo is amazing and I absolutely love it!

sidebar now that I'm on this soapbox. i think this is 100% the reason why iOS and macOS will never converge.

The desktop OS is a dying product. If everyone could do their work on their phones and tablets, they would. And that is happening now that iDevices are becoming significantly more capable and microsoft seems to be throwing less weight at moving Windows licenses.

alas, if this is true, it makes so much more sense to throw significant resources at making phones and tablets the best they can be instead of shoehorning a dying desktop experience into a mobile factor (something that's been tried way too many times before)

[superkuh]

>browsers can still talk HTTP/0.9 and HTTP/1.0

For now. It won't be too many years before the mega-corp browsers not only drop early HTTP support but they drop HTTP/1.1 too. They'll do this in the name of "security". And then all that Chrome based browsers will support will be their very own invented and open-washed QUIC in the form of HTTP/3 and hosting a personal website visitable by a random person will not be possible without continued permission from an incorporated entity. HTTP/3 implementations by Google so far have made it so that Chrome CANNOT establish a connection without a proper certificate authority based TLS certificate. I give this change about 3 years.

You can argue that you can always get a CA TLS cert from another entity if, say, the incredible centralization of all the personal web into LetsEncrypt somehow goes bad. True enough, but if the pressure group can pressure LE it can probably pressure $otherCA too. And frankly, having to get the continued approval of any incorporated entity to host a website is just not acceptable. LE is currently a benign overlord for good on the web. So was dot Org for many years. But if it's made valuable enough the pressure and corruption will come.

[nunez]

this is exactly what's happening and it can be concerning, but from reading the http/3 spec, i think the changes make a lot of sense.

http/3 is multiplex by default, which lends itself much better to RPC (love it or hate it), and is designed to perform much better over choppy network connections (cellular).

also there is really no good reason to not be on https these days. first, chrome uses system certificate trust stores, and OSes still ship with a healthy set of root CAs. second, LE is only popular because creating certs with literally anyone else (except the cloud providers) is expensive and a huge pain in the ass...but you can still get your own shiny cert issued by DigiCert or whomever. third, every web server has made enabling https on vhosts really easy and almost all servers run on CPUs which do hw-accelerated crypto, so performance hits are negligible these days. fourth, i would personally much rather get a SSL warning when the site I'm visiting isn't who they say they are than get a site that's modified in transit silently without me knowing.

the only thing i use http for these days are super simple local dev sites or for my dummy page for detecting captive portals.

the change that really worries me is chrome going all in on neutering adblockers through manifest v3. that feels hugely anti-consumer to me.

[superkuh]

You're missing out on the fact that the de-facto standard which is disappearing is HTTP+HTTPS. Not one or the other. Together they provide security and choice. This is what I hope we all chose to continue supporting. I am not anti-TLS. I'm not even anti-CA TLS. I just think HTTP should be an option.

The only situations where HTTP has reason to be removed entirely are government/corporate/institutional sites with a genuine risk of MITM attacks on login/etc processes. For normal websites (ie, not web applications with accounts) created by humans this makes about as much sense as wearing a bullet proof vest while on the phone; yeah, you're more secure but... it's not actually helping.

[Eupraxias]

Why is this getting downvoted? Can someone who is downvoting, or anyone, provide a reason?

Is the comment patently incorrect?

[Karrot_Kream]

Is a proof-less conspiracy statement supposed to be enjoyed and loved? It's more conspiratorial emotion than fact. These "I miss the old internet" posts come up every week or so on HN and are largely all the same conspiracies with slightly different wording and no more proof than before.

[Eupraxias]

Fair enough - I hadn't considered that the implication was it would take a conspiracy to do it.

[randac]

Welcome to hn in recent years.

The site desperately needs some form of meta moderation.. I've barely scrolled this thread and seen multiple examples already.

[wintermutestwin]

> The desktop OS is a dying product. If everyone could do their work on their phones and tablets, they would.

Count me out of this brave new world of tiny screens and crappy UI/UX.

[knome]

I wish I could ignore it. It seems many web designers, even at major companies, don't consider PCs anymore.

Google's new carousel features aren't proper links and don't respond to middle-clicks. If you want to pop out an image into its own tab you have to first click it, then pop it out from their more-info panel.

Azure has similar problems, where listings collapse to nigh unusable sizes on desktop and Ctrl-f is broken horribly since many of their page switches actually just slide the current page to the left while keeping it loaded, so that when you go to search, the interface starts dragging back to hits on the previous page. Not that Ctrl-f really works in the face of the "only load just enough of the content that fits into the undersized box" anyway.

They'll push megabytes of javascript to avoid server-side rendering kilobytes of source, making the whole thing harder to use than it needs to be.

[mdbauman]

I highly doubt the phone and PC markets will converge any time soon.

Apple has made seemingly made the most progress toward this and it isn't hard to imagine someone plugging their iPhone in to a screen when they arrive at work and resuming their Excel spreadsheet with the connected keyboard, no different than the company-issued laptop today. But I don't see what incentive Apple has to make that a reality when they can keep selling people two separate $1000+ devices.

Edit: I would love to be proven wrong, so any opinions/examples to the contrary are very welcome.

[thesuitonym]

Using tablets or phones doesn't necessarily mean tiny screens--although for the life of me, I can't understand why so few companies have put effort into making a phone with a UI that scales for regular screens. (I know they exist, don't sent me examples, thee point is that there are so few of them."

[metadat]

Samsung DEX.

[ghastmaster]

That is innovation! I like scrcpy for controlling the phone from my desktop.

[rchaud]

I got a Galaxy Fold and it's remarkable how much more 'active' work I'm doing on my phone now that I can switch to iPad Mini-sized dimensions and it still fits in the palm of my hand. The narrow screens that 99% of phone users have seem to adversely incentivize shallow, consumption-oriented usage in my case.

[ako]

With iPadOS 16.2 you’ll be able to connect your M1/M2 iPad to a big monitor via usb-c, use a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, and it’ll be just like using a laptop.

[wintermutestwin]

Yeah, except I can't run uBlock Origin, which makes an iPad a nonstarter for me.

[deafpolygon]

Because of the sweet, sweet advertising dollars.

[nunez]

tbf, a lot of sites i use these days have apps that are better than their web sites from a UX perspective, and the iPad Pro 12.9 I just got has an unbelievably color-accurate XDR display that bests the MacBook Pro 13 I'm trading in for it.

[fragmede]

Desktop not a dying product anymore than cars are a dying product. They are undergoing changes (ICE to EV) and there are alternatives (trains) but they're simply not going away. Desktop OS is for creating digital things. Phones are the way to digitize things that have been created outside of the computer. Phones don't have dual 24" monitors. Dual 24" monitors don't fit in your pocket. Different use cases, with a lot of gray area in between.

[ako]

You’ll be able to connect you’re mobile devices to large screens soon, see the M1/M2 iPads. A lot of professional content creation is already moving to mobile devices like music, 3D design, writing, painting, video shooting and editing, photo shooting and editing. Other professions are also using mobile devices for professional work like inspections, pilots, medical doctors, etc, etc. Soon (already?) more professional work will be done on mobile devices rather than on desktops.

[Eupraxias]

And then there are those of us who positively REVILE the mobile interface. I will continue to use a non-laptop desktop computer until I have no choice.

For me, I turn my telephone on for 2FA challenges, and then turn it off again. I hate those things.

[deafpolygon]

> i think this is 100% the reason why iOS and macOS will never converge.

They will never converge because keeping 100% control over their walled garden is too profitable. Apple makes too much money off tablets and phones through app sales, subscription, control over advertising, etc.

[ekanes]

Agreed. Was quite surprised when my daughter was doing grade 8 math homework on her phone. Would never have occurred to me to try, let alone want to!

[lakomen]

Did AI write this?

[btbuildem]

"People only care about consuming" -- it might seem that way to a lazy beholder. The entire digital landscape is engineered for consumption -- of ads, and the products they advertise.

Yet individuals continue to CREATE content on which these parasites piggy-back. We are creatives by nature. The consumption is just one facet; had we built "the internet" out of tools and spaces more suitable for creativity, perhaps this would be more reflected in the general trends. Even now, you can't stem the tide of silly, interesting, creative things people post in these narrow, controlled channels.

[dfxm12]

Interesting that you left off the qualifier "many", changing the context of OP's statement.

I'll say, talking about "many" in the pool of all Internet users is pretty much meaningless (you can count "many" among any sub-population from a starting population so large), but OP is clearly implying that there are a great deal more consumers than creators out there.

Stats support this, like 97% of tweets coming from only 25% of tweeters: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2021/11/15/2-comparing-...

[deltarholamda]

Exactly this. The sort of person who kept a personal Web site in the 90s and 00s is the sort of person who keeps a personal journal. Back then it was a fairly significant outlay of cash (domain name, hosting, etc.) Right around the time these things got significantly cheaper, it also ran up against the competition from siloed services (Twitter, Facebook).

It takes a certain type of person to keep up a personal site that is largely disconnected from a wider audience. The people posting memes, quips and barbs on social media aren't "creative" per se. They're engaging in the dopamine drip machine of social media.

Technical people are more used to this kind of thing, as they are almost forced to delegate their cognitive load onto some sort of medium that they can access so they don't have to remember how to set up load balancing in Docker or whatever.

[nightski]

This isn't true at all imho. People love to create. It's just that they are all using Snapchat/Tiktok/Instagram/etc... now instead of web sites.

Personally I hate it. But that's where all the creators are.

[indymike]

> SquareSpace would be trading way higher than they are now, Twitter wouldn't exist, and Facebook would look a lot like MySpace.

What is remarkable is that despite trying to wall the garden, the personal website is still a thing.

> Many people don't care about web culture; they only care about consuming.

Maybe the era of shifting print, TV and radio to the internet is reaching saturation. You can view the internet as a content distribution system, but that ignores the key difference between internet and broadcast media: it is a two-way communication media.

> My take: people created websites back then because there was no other choice.

There were plenty of choices. The big innovation was the social network that allowed people to connect with friends, family, and people with common interests. Now you could write something, take a picture, make a video, whatever, and share it with people who would start communicating with you and form communities around those interests.

> Most people have non-computery interests, and that's fine.

Most people now communicate via the internet about those non-computer-y interests.

[throwaway0asd]

No. 20 years ago people created personal websites because it was a creative endeavor for creative personalities. Creative people are a population minority. Social media took over as the internet population grew because most people value immediate gratification more than personal expression.

I wish there was deep profound social, economic, or behavioral issues at play, but there aren’t. Some people want to build things and others just want to shout into a void or stare at those who do.

[heavyset_go]

> Many people don't care about web culture; they only care about consuming. Just like many people don't become screenwriters or directors because they love TV or movies (though this is definitely a bigger pipeline than tech); they just want The Avengers or Real Housewives or whatever.

Is it what they want, or is that only what the market is willing to give them that's profitable? And how much of it is the result of manufactured consent?

[jjav]

> Most people have non-computery interests, and that's fine.

Even though I'm in tech in silicon valley, all the personal websites I maintain are related to non-tech hobbies.

[NoboruWataya]

In my experience techies often maintain websites for their non-tech hobbies. But non-techies are much more likely to publish about their hobbies via other media like Facebook, Reddit etc. Your tech background drives the choice of medium, if not the choice of content.

[ddingus]

I disagree.

Consumption is important, but so is culture. Interaction is a big deal to many people. Look at the dynamics related to notifications, for example. People check in, desire the feedback, that interaction, and they seek more of it, form connections around it, and more.

[Gormo]

If what were true? I'm not seeing an empirical claim to evaluate here.

[abeppu]

> Many people don't care about web culture; they only care about consuming.

> Most people have non-computery interests, and that's fine.

But personal sites don't need to be about web culture per se. The best ones were often about some other interest or perspective that happened to be combined in a person who was also tech-capable enough to share it online. And 15 years ago, if you had some passion, whether that was french cooking or birding or carpentry or something else, a personal website or blog was a pretty good way to share it. But now, you'd get a better audience through sharing that same perspective on social media.

I think the thing that's hard to get on a personal site is the immediate feedback that social media provides. The issue as I see it isn't so much that people only want to consume (that was always the case) but that people creating content are in a numbers-driven competition for eyeballs. Creating and publishing stuff online has been mashed together with status/follower-seeking behaviors, and your own personal site likely doesn't provide the same dopamine hit. Even if you're posting about your latest sewing project, putting it on social media can get you some likes and comments, but putting it on your personal site can feel like talking to an empty room.

And aside from the minor technical challenges of creating your own site, I think people rarely talk about the legal or administrative burdens of creating your own whitelabel place to host your content. Do you want to track how people use your site with some analytics tool? What TOS and cookie opt-outs do you need to provide in that case? Oh, you'd like to have a comments section under your posts? What are the GDPR implications of that? You're publishing online so it's not for "purely personal or household purposes" after-all. What if after your personal project gains an audience, you decide to sell some merch -- then because you're 'a business', what has to change for you to meet CCPA obligations? Whereas if you have just a bunch of social media profiles, you don't control and are not responsible for handling that user data.