[pjerem]

I think you and the author both misunderstood what we really lost.

I don’t think that what we miss the most is the old 90’s patchwork of gif style. Not that I’m not nostalgic of it, of course I am.

But what I miss is the fact that back in the day, owning a little part of the internet was the normal thing and, contrary to nowadays profiles on social media, this space was really yours. It was as awful as what people’s tastes and minds are but it had, well, personality. And you really owned it. It was awful because you were awful but that was ok because everybody is awful. If it was nice, that was because you took the time to make it nice.

It’s not the style I miss, but the fact that it was the result of a real person’s hobby.

[giantrobot]

This is the most salient point. The lost feature of the 90s web is the content, not the GeoCities aesthetic.

Web pages were quirky not because of gifs but because someone lovingly collected a bunch of Dragonball Z images or wrote summaries of X-Files episodes and put those up for others to enjoy. Some people put up recipes or stories or whatever. Most amateur homepages weren't a monetized side hustle, just content about the creators' interests.

Unfortunately today a lot of passion content lives in social media silos. Some still survives on the web, though now on Wikis rather than homepages.

I don't miss the GeoCities aesthetic of the 90s web, I suffered through the design to get to the interesting content. The design wasn't the important part.

[AstixAndBelix]

I truly don't understand this argument.

First of all, people post extremely niche and personal content on their social media feeds. Heck, my own Twitter, Tumblr and Instagram feeds are mostly comprised of stuff on the same level of quirky ingenuity of the early web. So if your issue is with the presence of this type of "content", then I really don't see it.

Secondly you might argue, like many others, that the true problem is not that the content is here, but it's not the norm. It's not the norm to have a website, it's not the norm to be fragile and personal and quirky online. But even if that were the case, why do you care? There is more "90s-style" content today that there were in the 90s. You don't have enough time to live on this earth to read it all. Do you care if "in proportion" they don't make up the same share of the total webpages like they once did? Doesn't the sheer number of them not satisfy you enough?

[_Algernon_]

>First of all, people post extremely niche and personal content on their social media feeds.

In the old internet you could be reasonably certain that people where sharing because they wanted to share. There was no ulterior motive of profit, growing a large following, etc. It felt more genuine. Today, most people who actively post seem to be trying to build a following to become an "influencer".

It could be that this is a product of lack of discoverability of differently motivated content, but that lack of discoverability is still directly caused by what the modern internet is (its incentives and what is promoted by the giants in the space: engagement).

Gemini[1] and other small nets seem to capture some of that old share-with-no-ulterior-motive vibe, but we will see how long it lasts.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)

[giantrobot]

> Heck, my own Twitter, Tumblr and Instagram feeds are mostly comprised of stuff on the same level of quirky ingenuity of the early web.

This is exactly a problem I mentioned. You've got content on three social networks only one of which is readily crawlable by search engines. Twitter and Instagram are silos that really only want registered users to have access to content in their silo.

As to your second point you're ascribing to me an argument I did not make. I was pointing out that the amateur web of the 90s wasn't quirky because of garish colors or animated gifs. It was quirky because people put up passion projects. Seeing some "90s style" page that just puts animated gifs and garish colors is completely missing what made the web incredibly interesting.

[AstixAndBelix]

For a long time letters were only written by hand. Nowadays the only people writing them by hand are the people who truly want it.

In the early days you really had no choice. There was no WordPress, no MySpace and no Github Pages. It was the norm because it was the easiest thing to do if you wanted a presence on the web. If something like Facebook existed in 1993 let me assure you a whole lot of people would have been contempt with just creating a profile there and calling it quits.

There are more personal websites today than there ever were, people who want to be creative on the web always find a way.