I might be extremely old fashioned, but this is not the web I would want to be revived. This inaccessible mess of "artsy" html and css, images and gifs and sound bits.
The web I want back is the original one: hyperlinked text documents formatted using a standard language. I want my browser to basically be an e-book reader, where I can choose any font, spacing and formatting that I desire so any content on the web is exactly to my liking and I don't have to waste time figuring stuff out.
If you truly want to show me an image just upload it to your server and simply hyperlink it in your blog post. My browser will decide if and how to show it. Do I want a visual experience? Set the browser to automatically download every image and display it. Do I want to just read text without distractions? Set the browser to show me a download link without loading the image.
People who want their sites to be "works of art" or something should just create beautiful PDFs using a professional publishing suite or use a game engine to make a truly interactive experience. If you want your personal website to be a DOOM map where you access your pages by killing monsters then please don't push it into my browser but make it a dedicated offline experience.
Have you seen Bartosz Ciechanowski's interactive, educational articles? They're sometimes posted here on HN, e.g., [1] and [2]. They'd be impossible to realize if your browser were merely an "e-book reader", and they go way beyond text documents and pictures, so PDFs are out. And their reach would be miniscule if readers were required to download some offline program to view them.
> ...don't push it into my browser but make it a dedicated offline experience
They didn't push it into your browser. You pulled it when you chose to visit their server. Sure you used to be able to set a few things like font and background color, but the website author/administrator has always had more control than the client.
> ...so any content on the web is exactly to my liking and I don't have to waste time figuring stuff out.
This never existed. Already in the mid-nineties we were arguing about how to do navigation and other things the user had no control over, and they were complaining they couldn't figure it out.
It has a certain charm but I am kinda glad the animated construction gifs and nonsensical navigation menus (if at all) are gone.
I got online in 98 at age 15, I 100% grew up with this and took part - and I absolutely support people publishing stuff just for the fun of it, but I was kinda glad when everything started a bit more readable in the early 00s. Hell, I have no problem with the ugly backgrounds, just all the BLINK and pink on blue text and the gifs...
I think it's not about age but about aesthetic, im at least two decades off from my fifties and I definitely prefer hyper fast, minamilist design. I also prefer to curate my own experience especially with the web
Companies don't pay designers megabucks so that you can just rip their carefully crafted sites to pieces. Besides, there's Reader in Firefox and Safari which does just what you want.
So you didn't read the content did you? At least one part of what the author describes is exactly what you say you want. Go ahead, give it another try.
I think the sentiment is great, but reviving the old style is not necessary and makes it more kitsch than it has to be. I'm no fan of the boring, corporate Silicon Valley style either, but IMO the real revival spirit is about making your own personal style and not a fake 90s website.
Having read the article, there's no mentioning of reviving a particular visual / graphic style. On the contrary, the author explicitly states:
> It's important not to confuse the web revival with artistic styles such as Vaporwave;
Instead, the author tried to capture a set of first principles that seem to drive a more broad revival of early online culture. The first of those principles they list is:
> Creativity comes first - They value creative expression and the ability to customise and decorate their digital spaces.
Which agrees with what you're saying.
Arguably, the author's chosen design might inadvertently detract from that message. Then again, it's their personal website. They're calling the shots. This is how this individual chooses to express themselves. And that's just every bit as valid as what anyone else does, which would be a core tenet in support of online freedom.
If you click on some of the many outgoing links to other "revival" websites on that page you will see that they're all in that style. Perhaps this is just the case of the 90s aesthetic being the fashion of the day—particularly for zoomers who mostly didn't experience the 90s—but I still find it quite unoriginal.
I suppose that's personal taste, which is absolutely fine. Personally, I feel that the design isn't particularly appealing either, but that's, like, my own opinion.
The problem with revivals is that they're all about what the revivalist resonated with at the time. Most times are rich with creativity and multiple, often contrasting, viewpoints. When you distill them into a form of nostalgia, they are necessarily the reduction that resonates most with the folks orchestrating the revival.
The early web meant a lot of different things to a lot of different people, but many people want to claim that they represent the true spirit of the early web.
This calls back to a web of interconnected, non-commercial websites. Before Google there certainly were search engine websites but they weren't the big internet hub Google is today.
Instead people created webrings, toplists, link sites, directories (DMOZ!) to drive traffic, leading to fewer but more curated content
I really don't miss the bright and GIFy aesthetic, but I do miss a web to really "surf" from homepage to homepage, losing track of time, instead of "grinding" the same pages over and over.
There are some places that still evoke this feeling, notably Wikipedia and TVTropes
You can't find anything useful with Google anyway. It's about as reliable as Amazon search.
On Amazon you'll find a lot of faux-branded trash that is very specifically and very blatantly designed to resemble what you're looking for (if you're a pensioner or perhaps a dog)
but the result you were actually looking for will be on page 2 or in a thread on a forum. Or not listed at all.
Similar story for Google Search, you don't find anything useful, you find a dozen results that have been designed to look like they'll be useful.
Why use Google then? Half the "quick answers" results are wrong or based on unreliable sources, but presented as fact.
Google Images being peppered with shopping results is annoying as eating glass.
Google Shopping has never been useful because it just sends you to expired eBay listings or websites you wouldn't necessarily trust with your lawnmower let alone your card details.
And then there's YouTube — what a cesspool! There's only one view that matters there, your subscriptions. The feed/trending is just a torrent of genuinely crazy conspiracy/disinformation stuff that is obviously very popular... but I think if I ran, say, a library, I wouldn't fill the shelves with books about how to make guns and explosives, nor would I fill the racks with pornography. I'd stock such things but
The common feature is that the drive for profit = drive for views/clicks = skews all content moderation and indeed content creation towards that goal.
All art, wit, originality, truth is sucked into this vortex and spat out the other side as something "eye-catching" "clickbaity" "engaging" etc
This is true of Facebook, Twitter, you name it. Anything based on user engagement, clicks, ad views/interactions — all of that horseshit. It's all simply twisting content to suit the business rather than doing what's in the best interest of the user.
The user deserves accurate search results, impartial presentation of data and points of view, no dark patterns.
It frankly amazes me that we've gotten as far down this road as we have, in the last decade especially. It's nauseating.
You don't have to convince me, I was around in 1990's and loved the early days of the internet. You have to convince ambitious people to make sites that won't rank well in Google.
To me the biggest problem of the Web is that there still isn't a standardized way to publish on it. Just uploading files to your server isn't enough when your audience has no easy means to find out that it happened.
That's why all the big centralized sites have a huge advantage over the Web. Youtube, Twitter and Co. will send notifications when there is new stuff. My browser won't do the same for the Web. Recommendations are another thing missing on the Web. There is no way to get related websites without the author of the current one putting links on it.
RSS had a bunch of good ideas, but it never had good browser support by default and the need for the website author to create it, limited it's usefulness. I am also not a fan of RSS being basically a copy of the website, not the website itself. Shouldn't good HTML markup be enough to retrieve the information automatically?
Either way, I think we really need to reinvent publishing, bookmarking, searching and cataloging of the Web. Just going back to late 90s style of Web design isn't going to work when SoC optimized sites still bubble to the top and push everything else out of the way.
> RSS had a bunch of good ideas, but it never had good browser support by default and the need for the website author to create it, limited it's usefulness.
I discovered RSS late, I knew what it was but I never paid attention to it. Now it is my primary source for aggregation. It works well and is very alive. Big sites often provide multiple categorized feeds, RSS readers are simple and highly customizable in terms of curation.
Curation and organization/bookmarking are the killer features here, not necessarily reading itself. I often visit sites directly from my RSS reader and I don't typically care whether I'm only getting headlines and descriptions/leads rather than the full content from a feed.
The only bummer is that it isn't adopted by the masses. I think browsers should be blamed here. It should be a default, easy to use feature of every major browser IMO. I just don't see a good counter argument. There are a ton of unexplored use-cases for it too.
> I am also not a fan of RSS being basically a copy of the website, not the website itself. Shouldn't good HTML markup be enough to retrieve the information automatically?
I don't necessarily agree, but an alternative is promoted by the Indieweb community. They are marking up their HTML in a way so you can extract a feed directly from itself, I think it is called h-feed or similar. Most of the arguments I personally disagree with, especially thinking of HTML files as the source of truth, because in my worldview this complects data projection with normalized data representation (which HTML is terrible at). But all of their arguments have a compelling rationale that are interesting to think about and you might agree with.
Web browsers could've kept the web a much better place if they had placed prominence on their RSS integration instead of saying "that's a niche case for third parties to handle better"
I recently completed work on a small hobby project to support the small-web revival. It's a webring hosting platform. Unfortunately I haven't really had the time available to promote it. I don't expect it to really gather too much traction, however there's definitely been a bit of a revival of webrings!
It certainly contributed to it. IMO, the major killer was social media reducing the need for personal websites and blogs for most folks, and now silos like Discord, which don't allow information to be indexed on search engines, unlike traditional forums.
FWIW, I still run a personal site/blog, used to be very active on social media too, but am quite disenchanted with the idea of paying to reach your own audience.
Can you add two more rings and some example sites? It's difficult to evaluate if there is no content to use.
Have you considered introducing social features? Webrings are a form of a community. It would be helpful if there were the option to link to a community chat channel and wiki.
What I would love to see in a webring service would be comments and voting on each ring element, preferably with ActivityPub technology.
The cherry on top would be an rss feed for sites that are newly added to the ring.
Anyway, good luck for your site. The clean design is nice.
> Can you add two more rings and some example sites? It's difficult to evaluate if there is no content to use.
I really should have done this. To be honest I didn't really intend to 'launch' it today. I just saw a thread loosely related to the 'small-web', and thought I'd mention what I'd been working on. I'll put something together to demo the platform.
> Have you considered introducing social features?
I wanted to avoid social features, and instead focus on facilitating other people hosting their own webrings without needing to provide the infrastructure themselves. I figure people can easily provide these features themselves if they need it, and if I can avoid the added complexity of maintaining them, all the better. Plus, the added burden of moderating content is certainly best avoided.
The author calls the HTML website -> PDF zine switch "deurbanising the web" in his/her manifesto: PDFs are self-contained, offlineable, files, decentralised, discoverable, independent of browsers, with a tool ecosystem that exists today, open standard, part of the web, page oriented. The manifesto is an insightful read for sure: http://lab6.com/0
I think I would absolutely love to browse this "PDF internet" if only PDF files were smaller than the typical several megabytes. For that reason, gopherspace and gemini (or casual web with a text-only browser like w3m) seem like a more compelling alternative, but YMMV.
Do yo want to download this file? Yes. Open the file? Ok. Then zoom around, more zooming or less depending on the device you are because it's never the right size for your screen. That includes lots of panning around to have the right section on the screen, the smaller the screen the more panning. Page-oriented has value only if you read them on a page - printed or e-ink reader. Otherwise it's just a major hassle which also fills up your downloads folder. Yes, I hate PDFs in 99% of the cases.
Unfortunately PDFs require specialist knowledge to make them accessible, whereas HTML is accessible by default and requires specialist knowledge to fuck it up.
Whatever PDF is, it's surely not the way to unfuck the web given it can embed text-as-pictures, frequently breaks "semantic" (reading) text order, and can contain JavaScript just as a website can.
I'm sometimes printing to PDF to even be able to read an article full of autoplay videos, other ads, and trackers. The reason why the web is dying, and will continue to die, is simply JavaScript, a generational/resume-driven desire to venture into the most absurd techniques to make the simplest form work, seizure of the web by Google et al, coupled with a lack of incentives for quality content. And the astonishing foolishness of nerds wanting to turn the web into a reactive-functional mvc showcase or whatever.
The linked article seems a bit dismissive of Indieweb ( https://indieweb.org/ ) but I've found some terrific sites assoc w it -- eg BoffoSocko.com -- and they seem to me at least as big a part of the "revival" as any if the others noted there.
I also think Remix.run deserve a ton of credit for putting the focus back on web fundamentals (HTTP, HTML) and progressive enhancement (apps work without js enabled).
A quick note: I'm Melonking (The author of the article)
I'd just like to add, I see this as an artistic movement above all else. It's not about changing the world, and there is no goal here. It's not trying to solve any technical issues, nor is it about "defeating" social media or crypto stuff; and it's not about "succeeding" as a movement. The only goal is to exist, and we do! And if you want to join in, we're here and you're welcome, and we're so glad to see you!
I do agree there is a bias towards 90s themed sites in the article. It's a visual language that speaks to many people right now, but it's not exclusively part of the web revival. A web revival site is just about web design as play; where play is not about passing time but about creating other realities, so that we can become those realities.
The aim is not to be revisionist; it's not about remaking the past; it's about studying aspects of the past and mixing them with what we know today, in order to create something new.
There are many faces to the web; some are about rapid access to information, some are about commerce and business or data mining and technology etc etc; Web revival sites are just one face of that kaleidoscope; but its a face that is heavily under valued and under represented on the modern web.
There's a great video[1] on VRChat and how its current state seems to encapsulate a lot of the article's ethos but for emerging metaverse tech. I suspect that if Meta is successful with their metaverse efforts it will be a repeat of the Geocities -> Facebook transition.
I watched this video not long ago and realized I had sorely misjudged the VRChat community. I had only ever experienced the public community and I just assumed that is all there was to VRChat. I had no idea that such meaningful and dedicated communities existed in private. I feel like I should fire up the 'ol headset again and go looking once more.
The web wasn't taken over by advertising and walled gardens. It was always like that. Most of the folks experiencing those Angelfire or GeoCities sites back in the day got online through a paid portal. Popups and banners were ubiquitous (web 0, gopher 1).
The web never quite met Ted Nelson's (among others) dreams. It's the 21st century and not only do I not have bidirectional links but there's no hope of Nelson-style transclusion. [1] And Xanadu [2] remains a dream.
I'd be more interested in seeing or helping explore lost ideas like those than in creating some shadow of the actual 1990s. That would allow us to explore other past futures (alternative presents?) than this one. And why the nostalgia trip for old web if not exploring what we lost?
I love clicking through 90s internet on websites I barely remember from those times on the internet archive.
One of the earliest websites on the net was deoxy.org emerging from a mailing list that started in the 1980s, there was a big community around it that changed my life for the better. Here's a mirror [1]
Here's an even older one [2]
I'm of the opinion that this website is of archaeological significance. Glad there's mirrors out there.
Rumor has it that guy who ran it got a job at Apple and was compelled to get rid of the thing. Wild.
Bidirectional links and transclusion are core, essential features in the wave of amazing PKM tools and services that the "Tools For Thought" community uses in daily work. See eg Obsidian, logseq, roam / athens, etc.
Here are the seeds of the future of actual AI, maybe in 50-100
years. Useful AI (not machine learning, classifiers etc) begins in IA
(intelligence amplification) and builds outwards according to human
needs.
> Useful AI (not machine learning, classifiers etc)
That's the most useful AI we have to date. But I agree with you, intelligence amplification is my most desired AI fruit. I hope to experience it someday.
I am experimenting today with using GPT-3 to get difficult concepts explained in a Q&A fashion, with or without contextual text. Results are mixed, sometimes it can dumb down a concept to make it clear, other times I feel I better spend my time reading the original paper.
I foresee personalised tutoring by language models becoming a trend. Not just for kids, but for everyone who needs to keep up with a rapid changing field and needs to research a lot of scientific literature.
AOL was definitely a trash heap and as you describe with the ads, but it was ridiculed for being that way. I can definitely remember using the web pre-walled garden and pre-advertising. Back when the primary way to log on was through a shell account it was definitely this way. Gopher was similar. Even when I got my first PPP dial up account and could properly browse without Lynx the web was very enthusiast driven. Companies just weren’t there yet.
I agree that we can’t remake the 90s, but there was definitely a point where the internet was very much like a worldwide computer club or mega BBS.
My charitable read of the comment here might be: the only culturally acknowledged web presence today is that of the Platform -- and when the platforms are so monopoly-adjacent, the skills necessary to build a planet scale platform really are pretty cutting-edge and rarefied [1]. But there's nothing about making a website of your own that requires that -- so ordinary people ought to feel like they can attempt it on their own without a Platform in control.
[1]. inb4 "but if we'd all just stuck to monospaced plain text without executable scripts, none of that would have been necessary!"
It’s probably easier to set up a ‘planet scale’ website now than it was to set up a website in the 90’s. Setting up a VM like lightsail and hooking up a CDN is pretty straightforward. Setting up a serverless site is even easier.
That's sort of part of it. On the one hand, I'm absolutely for anyone with the urge to go out and build a web site, just like I'm the same way about someone wanting to write. If all they find out is that they don't actually like doing it, then hey, they're still ahead.
On the other hand, I'm tired of the goofy fetishizing of the early, rather exclusive and limited web wrapped up in a copy-and-paste rant about social media and how this is some bold alternative to teh corporations. The talking about people who just have websites as if they've rejected modern society and gone off to live in communes in the wilderness...it's just deeply weird, and it's probably best killed by more people considering making a website a perfectly normal and doable thing.
Then, of course, we'll probably have much of the same enthusiasts bemoaning all the "terrible" websites by the wrong sorts of people.
So... I tend to think that social media deserves to be ranted about and that teh corporations are, in fact, Actually Bad, so I'm pretty forgiving of those parts. (And, in fact, I like that it gets duplicated in people's own little ranty ways -- it creates a nice document trail of the folk understanding of these issues) However,
> fetishizing of the early, rather exclusive and limited web
and
> the same enthusiasts bemoaning all the "terrible" websites by the wrong sorts of people
I will cede are quite real -- things like https://250kb.club/ hostile to images, everyone being convinced that even progressive use of vanilla JavaScript -- indisputably part of the idiom of the web -- is an evil... hell, we can count all of the "how dare you Wordpress" scorn...
the aestheticization of the technical foundations of people's expression seems like a great hobby for techies (explicitly, in [Gemini]) but a bad thing to have influencing actual ordinary people trying to use computers to do stuff.
[Gemini]: As a core principle! "A client comfortable for daily use which implements every single protocol feature should be a feasible weekend programming project for a single developer."
>(..)but a bad thing to have influencing actual ordinary people trying to use computers to do stuff.
I don't think any of this has any chance of influencing ordinary people, I see this as a niche reactionary phenomenon entirely within the tech sphere, literally no one else cares.
I tend to think that social media deserves to be ranted about
Maybe. While I dislike a lot of social media, I'm tired of the rants because they are the definition of echo chamber. When I see such a rant that actually acknowledges why blogs and social media were useful and more attractive than building websites to most users, I'll have time for it. Until then, I think the complainers are not much less out-of-touch than the Gemini scene. (But at least the Gemini people are doing it deliberately.)
The worst thing about the rants, though, is that they come from people who act like they have just discovered that Chrome takes them to places other than Facebook. Like they think that these are unexplored new lands for them to claim in the name of a hipster-esque pose.
There's no web "revival"; the web never went away, it never stopped growing, it never even slowed down.
I am also working towards this direction at Relevanto[1]. Encouraging the exploratory way of stumbling upon the good stuff. Lots of work but it's worth it.
I see where you're coming from and surely understand your point.
It's good that you are able to tell some of these things apart. Now think how did you get to this point, likely by being exposed to various views so that's a good thing and should be encouraged. Especially with some of the more polarizing matters, one should be aware of other views.
One cannot develop a sense of things by living in a bubble, in fact I'd argue that the society is seemingly more polarized because of these bubbles, the general avoidance to be exposed to opposing views and consider the reasonings objectively but that's a discussion for another place and time :)
Now just waiting for the flash revolution… maybe we can ffwd to the early 2000s flash (swf) interactive web this time with html5 tools (yugop, hillman curtis, north kingdom, etc)
In any case, great to see new pulses of creativity in the web
This is what the world looked like when it felt safe/exciting/mysterious, maybe I'll feel that way now if I make it look like that again. For me that world is in the seventies, not the nineties. I want a psychedelic not a web revival.
> Web Revival is one name for an internet based movement that has a bunch of names, here are a few of them;
This movement is quite frankly hopelessly utopian and that nostalgic ship has sailed 30 years ago with the late stragglers missing that ship and talking about coming on-board.
It is no different to the utopian Web3 DAO communities I keep seeing who think that everything is going to be on-chain. Reviving this Web 1.0 and thinking that is everything is going back to that in the modern era is also just as utopian.
Not many of these revivalist communities will survive in their absolute ideals and some of them will end up compromising in the long run to go against what they have been preaching for.
Here's and example of one building the Small Web and is part of the so-called 'Web Revival': https:/small-tech.org
I wonder how much of the 'indie web' exists in its original (not revived) form. Are there any numbers for it? Going by link rot and domain expiries perhaps less than half over the course of a decade or two. So much for cool URIs don't change!
For me, it's more about the information discovery element. Beyond a penalty in Google and not being in the 24 hour news cycle of social media- you don't have traditional discovery like web rings, directories like DMOZ and forums that specialise in a niche. They're all still present in one form or another, but far less prominent.
It might just be me but I genuinely never liked the by now archaic design, instead it's always been about how the culture and community was very vibrant and different (talking about anime on 4chan vs a dedicated fan forum) each time.
In fact if I really were to be nostalgic with web design it would have to be the successor to simple web when every website was unique in its design (there were some fads like the website should look like an early dnb CD cover with really small text).
I have fond memories of the web 1.0, but I have no need for a revival of its aesthetics.
What I long for is a space with no commercial interests or social media agenda, but one that exists for sharing stuff for the sake of self-expression and non-gamified exchange/shooting the shit with like-minded peers.
(now where do you find those 'under construction' giffies? :-)
/* old things never die, they just get pushed to some free github repo. Maybe there is some git server up there in the sky, that will take care of us when we die :-( (figuratively speaking) */
Does anyone know where I can find those banners that said things like "Best viewed with a Macintosh"? I'm thinking specifically of one with animated gif with a rotating 90s Apple logo.
In exchange, I offer this rare jpg from my files: [rare jpg withdrawn].
I don’t get it. The popularization of crypto is exactly what someone interested in web revival should want (breaking down barriers, rules, walled gardens, etc).
Ponzi schemes have always existed and will continue to exist. We should instead teach people to be more resilient to / be better at spotting them instead of trying to completely remove any possibility of ponzis, which was never going to be possible in the first place.
What I don't get is what those purported "barriers, rules, walled gardens, etc" are that Web3 enthusiasts keep claiming they are bringing down.
I could set up my own website on its own server back in 2004, when Google was still an up-and-coming disruptor, Amazon was just starting AWS, and Facebook was only a glint in Zuckerberg's eye. Now in 2022, when Google is called the "most powerful company in the world", maybe 30% of the internet is running on AWS, and Facebook is sometimes considered a threat to democracy, I can still set up my own website on its own server.
What barriers have been raised between then and now? And how do Web3 or cryptocurrencies "break them down"?
You can capture some of the profit flows now, which I think is key.
Open source is open source and will always have a place. You should be able to set up a website on your own server whenever you want, but that's different than being able to directly take part in ownership of capital.
I'm afraid I still don't understand. Which profit flows are you talking about? And ownership of which capital?
If I set up a personal website or for a local non-profit organisation with no advertising, there is no profit to capture. And if I include advertising or take donations I don't need to capture "some" of the profits, I already capture them in their entirety.
Regarding capital, are you referring to server infrastructure? I can see the appeal of some kind of "hosting cooperative" in which all users of the servers take part ownership of them. These may already exist. However, I fail to see how cryptocurrency would be necessary for this in any way.
> The popularization of crypto is exactly what someone interested in web revival should want (breaking down barriers, rules, walled gardens, etc).
I think the primary point of conflict might be that web revivalists actually want simplicity, openness, and equality, whereas crypto enthusiasts just say they do.
It makes me very happy to know that all of these websites exist.
It also makes me sad to see unnecessary hostility towards crypto. I get it: most NFTs are hyper commercialized trash, and they're in direct opposition to the values outlined in this article. But there's also so much weird, non-commercialized crypto stuff out there that shares a lot of the ethos of early web tinkerers.
I am not aware of any non-commercialized crypto anything (from my understanding, this is sorta by definition, but maybe I'm missing something). Do you have any examples?
The Worm is a really fun one. The idea is that you transfer the worm NFT from wallet to wallet (it's "trying to visit every wallet on the Ethereum blockchain"), and it leaves a non-transferrable token wherever it's been. To my knowledge, it's been transferred about 750 times without anyone selling it. https://theworm.wtf/
Another cool one is minting amulets. You write a poem, and if the hash of that poem has an amulet in it (four or more consecutive 8s), then you can mint it as a token for your collection. But you can't mint the same hashed poem twice https://text.bargains/collection/
I also met someone once who gave me (and everyone he meets) an NFT from an RFID chip implanted in his hand. That was pretty whacky.
(RE: The Worm) First thing I thought was, what if it gets stuck? Turns out, that's already happened; the 272nd recipient had clipboard hijacking malware that changed the address they'd copied for sending it to, so the original NFT is stuck at the malware's destination address.[0] The organizers had anticipated this and used a feature in the smart contract to remove the worm from the on-blockchain image of the original NFT, as a symbolic way of invalidating it.[1] (Is this an example of "overpowered owner"?) I couldn't find anything else about the implementation, except that it's called "yoink" and that the ambition.wtf site mentions "yoink-chain Smart Contract mechanics".
Strangely, the original NFT,[2] linked from another Medium post, now contains the worm again. But the rest of the image also differs from the screenshots in the post, so perhaps they added the worm back after starting the next iteration[3] as an acknowledgement that the original is stuck for good.
Also, I get that it's an art thing, but what is it with the...weird (IMO)...tone? I feel like I also see it elsewhere in NFT-related writing. Reminds me of lesswrong for some reason.
> I am not aware of any non-commercialized crypto anything
Say I am an amateur content creator and I set up a donations page for my fans. I have the choice between:
- Setting up PayPal/Stripe/etc. who take a percentage cut, sell my data, can freeze my funds at any time or delete my account if they don't like my content
The crypto ethos is antithetical to that of non-commercial content creators - putting a crypto wallet address on a website is like putting a big banner saying "I'm helping legitimise an environment destroying pyramid scheme to enrich myself, and I'm probably into lots of other shady stuff too", which might be fine for venture capitalists and their like, but not non-commercial content creators. Putting a donation link to something like ko-fi.com on the other hand is a better look for that sort of site.
> The crypto ethos is antithetical to that of non-commercial content creators - putting a crypto wallet address on a website is like [...]
Yeah, so no true non-commercial content creator would use evil crypto. By the snark, I can tell you are as invested in hating crypto as some of us are invested in building it. What is your motivation?
This is a great use of crypto that (IMO) ties in directly with these movements.
It's sad that 'you can join the simple web revival as long as you hate this thing we all decided to hate' seems to be a message that's pushed.
The amount of fans with a credit card and/or a paypal account will dwarf the amount of fans with a crypto wallet. This means that unless you target a very specific audience where you could expect that many of them have a crypto wallet, you will likely get a larger amount of donations if you go the paypal/stripe way than if you go the crypto way.
It's not like cryptocurrencies don't take a cut (in the larger coins, transaction fees are often higher than the amount of money most fans would like to donate) or sell your data (usually not the coin devs themselves, but there are definitely companies/exchanges out there correlating transactions and selling data about them). Stripe and Paypal might not be great, but just because crypto is "not Paypal" does not make crypto automatically trustworthy.
A currency is generally intended mainly for commercial purposes, isn't it? I think the word commercialized isn't quite right for what I mean then.
So more specifically, I mean: "not for the purpose of creating or transferring monetary value, and not requiring the expenditure of money to create/send the amount of data necessary to host a simple plaintext/html page"
> But there's also so much weird, non-commercialized crypto stuff out there that shares a lot of the ethos of early web tinkerers.
Bullshit. Without miners there's no "crypto" and without payouts there's no miners. So "web3" can only exist where there's some financial incentive to run miners. Users can't spend real money to access this system so they need to convert their money to Geoffrey dollars to even access "web3" content. This is 180° from the "old web". End users needed no more investment than their computer and Internet connection. They didn't have to prop up some asshole's upline to check out the Unofficial X-Files Fan Page.
> So "web3" can only exist where there's some financial incentive to run miners.
I can say the same about anything else on the internet. Keeping the servers running costs money
> Users can't spend real money to access this system so they need to convert their money to Geoffrey dollars to even access "web3" content.
You can actually access most web3 content without spending Geoffrey dollars, or US Dollars. If we're talking about public blockchains like Ethereum, it's all out in the open. By definition, it's a public ledger. IPFS data (which has nothing to do with crypto) is also very public.
> End users needed no more investment than their computer and Internet connection.
I guess some web3 websites require you to connect with a wallet, but downloading a browser extension doesn't seem very prohibitive.
What problem is web3 even trying to solve? As it stands today I can conduct commerce over the web, pay for access to content directly, or have free content that is advertising supported. Having to connect with a wallet and spend some specialized cryptocurrency to access a website provides what benefit? It seems like a solution chasing a problem like literally everything else crypto related.
I think the main class of problems it solves is it lets multiple applications, which may be developed by completely different entities at different times, share data with very strong guarantees.
So in the context of the Web Revivalist movement, how do you build stateful applications? It's great when individuals host their own DIY servers, but that doesn't really give you much stability. And in aggregate, it's even more difficult to build rich, stateful ecosystems of applications. How do you handle servers going down and APIs changing? Link rot for stateless websites is a hard enough as it is.
> I think the main class of problems it solves is it lets multiple applications, which may be developed by completely different entities at different times, share data with very strong guarantees.
It doesn't, though. That's bullshit. Sharing data between web applications is not some sort of grand challenge that required new technology to solve.
Not bullshit, I've seen it happening already. One team set up http://hicetnunc.xyz/ to host niche NFT-s on the Tezos blockchain. Later they abandoned the whole project and meanwhile another team started to build a new platform on the same dataset. https://objkt.com/
This was pretty cool because all the Hic en nunc generated content over their existence is still accessible through Objkt.
Sharing data is of course possible since stone tablets, but doing it without any form of collaboration or approval is probably unique to crypto.
I'm not trying to swindle you. I'm trying to have an intelligent conversation. You don't need to call all my points bullshit :)
It depends on the level of guarantees you want for that data. If we're communicating, and you're okay with me changing my APIs, or even changing the data itself in ways we didn't previously agree upon, then you 100% don't need a blockchain. And if you don't have a lot of entities that need to coordinate on the data, then there might be an easier solution.
And introducing a blockchain to the equation changes nothing about that! It doesn't magically make applications interoperate with each other, or make them consume each other's data, or force them to maintain API compatibility. At most, it provides a shared, public location for them to store data -- and even that has some very awkward limitations associated with it.
A lot of the blockchain boosterism I see online comes from a place of assuming that the blockchain represents a solution to a problem, and trying to work backwards from there. Avoid that.
Maybe we're just talking past each other, but this is the entire point of a smart contract platform. I deploy code to it, and you now have a guarantee forever on the interface of that code, as well as its implementation logic. If I'm running the same code on my server and you're hitting my API, then I can change the interface, change the logic, or mutate the data in ways not specified by that code.
So really when I say "applications" I'm referring specifically to other smart contracts.
Smart contracts that cost money to run on a virtual machine with less power than a Raspberry Pi. In order to access a DApp someone needs to buy into some cryptocurrency, providing some early holder the ability to cash out. The DApp user also has to trust that the smart contract doesn't have a stupid bug that will drain their wallet. Oh and thanks to the low transaction rate of a blockchain that DApp might never execute or have a flash crash type spike in cost.
It's a bunch of rent seeking bullshit on top of what could just be a web API. Storage on a blockchain is stupid expensive so there's oracles everywhere pointing to off-chain resources with zero guarantee of availability.
Blockchains aren't adding any value. They're only extracting rent and adding friction.
> Without miners there's no "crypto" and without payouts there's no miners. So "web3" can only exist where there's some financial incentive to run miners.
People have motivations besides financial incentive.
I've got a website. I'm paying for it. I make no money from it. The web exists.
A miner is just a spare computer in service of a network. Like a closet web server, or a seeder in a public torrent swarm.
A closet web server or torrent seeder can perform its task on its own. It only requires Internet access and some electricity and it's good to go. Unless you're paying by the byte to your ISP the costs of running the server is electricity costs.
A single miner can't do anything on its own so blockchain transactions require the aggregate waste of a whole network of miners to accomplish anything.
For DApps to run the network of miners runs them. They demand payment for doing so. You can run a web server in your closet free of charge, a DApp that doesn't offer incentive to miners will never run. If you foot the bill for some DApp it'll cost you orders of magnitude more than a Raspberry Pi in your closet.
Crypto is about making sure the supply of something stays limited. Seems pretty contradictory to the spirit of free creative expression the Web Revival is going for.
I think they solve different problems. I love independent websites, and the web is an amazing medium for serving stateless content. But I think web3 compliments it really well when you want to do something that hooks into a larger, stateful ecosystem.
I think it really depends on what you want to do. If you want build a comment system for your website, then web3 is totally the wrong tool for the job. If you want to write an application that coordinates data across multiple websites, and you're worried about servers going down or APIs changing, then it's a little trickier to think of a simpler way.
Most importantly-- it shares the foundational feature of having such a small publishing cost that it creates a paradigm shift in how we are able to self-organize.
That's one thing that bothered and confused the cranks with burgeoning Wikipedia. Why does the Pokemon article have a longer page than one on the Vietnam War? The priorities are out of wack, they thought, without realizing that the lack of scarcity in a web page (well, technically a scroll) and low friction of revisions ends up changing the process of editing an encyclopedia for length.
It's similar for Bitcoin. Cranks on HN always want to to downplay it's 3-orders-of-magnitude superior transaction speed to Visa/Mastercard by pointing out the much smaller value being transacted. One million microtransactions for a grand total of $1000, they say, without realizing that it's the types of transactions these (often automated) payments support which simply aren't possible using the old payment paradigm.
Without the scale and speed of microtransactions Bitcoin makes possible, you don't just end up with a less effective National Association of Independent Investigative Units. Games in Geocities 2 don't just get a little bit laggy. FOSSmobiles don't just take a little longer to update their FOSStertainment panels. You simply end up with a world where none of that stuff exists.
Oh wait I forgot Bitcoin doesn't work like that. Still, we've got Sci-hub donations and that one ransomware that apparently donates to charities. So not so different, really.
Reading the yesterweb criticism page of crypto/web3 that is linked to by the OP makes me think this movement is not going to gain much momentum. The criticism is somewhat accurate, but extremely shallow and makes no attempt to steel man potential benefits.
Not that I expect this to land well with the HN crowd, but web3/crypto has the tyrannical effects of capitalism/growth on its side as a force for the “future of the web”. Going up against that with the non-profit model seems… quaint.
Yesterweb asks a simple question, "Can't we have one thing, one measly crumb-of-a-thing, not tainted by capitalism?" And the resounding response is "NO."
> Yesterweb asks a simple question, "Can't we have one thing, one
measly crumb-of-a-thing, not tainted by capitalism?" And the
resounding response is "NO."
The answer is "Yes, but at a cost". One must subsidise the parasitic
nature of digital capitalism.
Many of the comments here are about the style or mechanisms of the
web, but don't talk much about the values - which are sharing. The
object is to give some value to the world, sharing a little of the
creation you do.
I've set up websites with HOWTO essays, code examples, mp3 files of
sound effects I collected, interesting images etc. In the early days
it was popular and well regarded amongst a music coding community, but
within 10 years it was inoperable. Bots crawling all over it
constantly sucked the life out of the server, and literally tens of
thousands of parasitic links from commercial entities, spamdexers
and SEO trash attached themselves. My site was like a ship dragged
down by barnacles and weeds.
When I shut down the site I got angry emails from entitled assholes
who had embedded sound effects in their applications by linking to my
site as if it were an infinite free resource.
This story has been told a million times by people who set up websites
for fun in the 90s and 00s, and pulled them down after realising the
cost (often in time spent reading logs, defending, blocking, banning,
rate-limiting etc)
What is to be done? In the digital world capitalism does not create
value but extracts or appropriates it from creators. To be a digital
creator means paying a constant tax to support those who want to make
money from you.
While cryptocurrency type Web3.0 seems to offer a solution it only
fights fire with fire, wrapping the web in a framework of mutual
extraction and appropriation. Ultimately I think that only plays into
the hands of the extractors who will use it to find ever more
effective ways to thrive as parasites.
I'm looking forward to the NFT bear market where Ethereum moves to Proof of Stake, and people realize that unique digital assets are fun to create, collect, and trade without having to make money on them.
> unique digital assets are fun to create, collect, and trade without having to make money on them.
There's no such thing as a "unique digital asset". Networked computers are good at sharing copies. Any developments against this nature are manufactured, artificial scarcity, for the gains of the controlling party, at the expense of everyone else; and probably in the name of security.
If you like them so much I can roll a die and tell only you which number I got, but that wouldn't affect the world in any way unless we're gambling, nor make it any less "unique" than crypto - it's just more bits/dice.
The web I want back is the original one: hyperlinked text documents formatted using a standard language. I want my browser to basically be an e-book reader, where I can choose any font, spacing and formatting that I desire so any content on the web is exactly to my liking and I don't have to waste time figuring stuff out.
If you truly want to show me an image just upload it to your server and simply hyperlink it in your blog post. My browser will decide if and how to show it. Do I want a visual experience? Set the browser to automatically download every image and display it. Do I want to just read text without distractions? Set the browser to show me a download link without loading the image.
People who want their sites to be "works of art" or something should just create beautiful PDFs using a professional publishing suite or use a game engine to make a truly interactive experience. If you want your personal website to be a DOOM map where you access your pages by killing monsters then please don't push it into my browser but make it a dedicated offline experience.