[eternityforest]

On the early internet, it was all personal sites.

But we had attempts at journalism and tons of interactive content on those sites.

When there was no social media, people learned HTML to communicate, and we got all the variety of the early web.

Now people make sites because they like coding, and use them to communicate about coding. Or they use social media and comment on random drama.

The internet eats it's own refuse like AI does. Without real life stuff to talk about it's pretty terrible. Video games were the main interesting internet native subject, aside from tech itself in the pure sense, but gaming culture has become almost a 4chan offshoot, less interesting to everyone else, while the games themselves are full of DLC.

Modern computers are fast enough for bloated sites. I don't think the issue is tech(unless you're really unhappy with the privacy situation). It's that all the content is made by people who spend all day on the internet, and it's all about tech.

And tech is just going in circles. With less real world connection, everyone just wants to be better at writing code, to try new languages, etc. It's philosophy as much as real tech, or maybe like some modern cyberpunk version of meditation, they're all just seeking simplicity, and it doesn't make much sense to people who didn't join the scene because they loved elegant ideas.

It's like reading 10 biographies and writing about them and your experience reading them, vs the old Internet where you went and did stuff and wrote about your life.

[lmm]

Most early sites were personal but they weren't blogs. Many of them were even technical, but people made an effort to write for posterity rather than just for today. People wrote a site like they were writing a reference book, even if most of them got bored halfway through.

The fact that grandparent looks at Gemini and sees "10-15 posts per day" rather than "x sites with y pages" is the problem. Today's culture sees anything written on the internet as disposable; at best it's a magazine article, more likely it's a leaflet.

[aidenn0]

> On the early internet, it was all personal sites.

Assuming you mean WWW, this is patently false:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_founded_befor...

[1vuio0pswjnm7]

"It's that all the content is made by people who spend all day on the internet, and it's all about tech."

And "news" services that utilise the internet are more often than not biased toward so-called "tech" news.

It's like the internet is constantly promoting itself.

Then one looks at the advertising. The businesses that advertise the most are the ones who are entirely internet-based.

I'm not suggesting this is a new trend. Definitely not. But I had hoped it would change.

[3np]

Just noting the meta of this commentary being a common reoccurency on this very tech-news commentary forum ;)

[satvikpendem]

Who is everyone? There are proportionally very few coders in the world and even fewer making their own sites compared to non coders.

[skissane]

> There are proportionally very few coders in the world

I wonder how many people can code but for whom coding is neither a major part of their work, nor a significant hobby?

My brother is training to be an oncologist. But he did a computer programming elective as an undergraduate and wrote some Python programs, and I believe got a decent grade too (need to maintain GPA). That was years ago, but if he felt the need or motivation he could dust it off. I’m sure he’s got the brains to learn more of it if he wanted to, but between a young family and a very demanding training program, I understand why in his limited recreation time he’d rather read a sci-fi novel than muck around with computers. But when his kids are older and he’s more established in his career, he’ll have more time-if he fees the itch.

I joked with him recently that there is nothing stopping someone with his career from doing a bit of mine as a hobby, but the reverse is not true: “hobby oncologist” sounds rather disturbing.

[memefrog]

This is why I switched from programming professionally to doing something else. Pretty much every field of knowledge (that existed before 1950, at least) is interesting once you get into it. Most of them you cannot do for fun. I can program for fun. I can do something else for work. Doing programming as a job ruins my favourite hobby.

[Talanes]

I think the point was that the people producing content for their own personal website are a small, self-selecting group, with social media catching most of the rest of the online populace.

[Karrot_Kream]

You've really succinctly captured why I don't enjoy a lot of modern tech content online these days. It's too self-referential, too steeped in itself. The people involved are motivated by a reaction to other online content and want to produce new online content. Then there's the online beefs.

> Without real life stuff to talk about it's pretty terrible. Video games were the main interesting internet native subject, aside from tech itself in the pure sense, but gaming culture has become almost a 4chan offshoot, less interesting to everyone else, while the games themselves are full of DLC.

I think this is the exception. Most gamers I know find some social connection in it, even if connecting with other gamers about the game they're playing. The programmers just tilt at ever simplifying windmills pursuing their platonic digital ideal.

[giantrobot]

> On the early internet, it was all personal sites.

Personal sites maybe but people wrote about stuff they liked. There were thousands of sites that just covered some niche topic or what today would be called a fandom. Sure there were sites that were just someone's journal about themselves but easily just as many semi-authoritative topic focused ones.

The Internet Archive has a number of scans of old "Internet Yellow Pages" books and Wayback archives of DMOZ and Yahoo!'s directory. Take a look some time, for any given subject there's tons of sites listed with tildes in the path.