Yesterweb Discord set to close to refocus "effort into different projects"

[Regal]

Sure, but the difference is that people here embrace the fact that it's aesthetic and no one claims that this is a true-to-form re-creation of the old web. Generally speaking, people here openly embrace the parts of the modern web that are genuine improvements since the original forum era while attempting to re-create only those aspects that were both better about the past and feasible in the present.

I'll add that also the difference is tech literacy. I was talking to a lot of people unironically running Windows XP and shit for the aesthetic and I was blown off any time I brought up cybersecurity with them. I made the joke a couple times that YW was a Chinese/Russian psyop to get kids to create a botnet for them.

 

[Eden]

Another postmortem:

what happened to yesterweb?​

 

[Dolfin]

Cheapskate posted this yesterday:

The Birth and Death of the Yesterweb Forum Reveal Two Important Truths​

Think it's a pretty good read.

They're correct.

Also, unrelated to the thread topic, but

In my view, one of the major problems with the small or personal Internet is the dearth of individuals who are willing to create and maintain personal spaces that they take pride in and that the rest of us want to visit.

Telling everyone to go make a personal website right now will, in fact, lead to a lot of abandoned WIPs with nothing on them (or just a list of social links). Not everyone is cut out to keep a personal site, much less make it pretty or fill it with engaging content. Many people just aren't motivated enough by the prospect of creative expression in that medium or by any of the other reasons Cheapskate gives elsewhere. You can also totally have a website that you only update once every few months or so if what's on it is evergreen. Some of the anti-Big Tech sentiment rings hollow when you're putting hit/view counts on a pedestal and insisting on calling published stuff "content."
That said, their optimism is energizing.

 

[Eden]

Telling everyone to go make a personal website right now will, in fact, lead to a lot of abandoned WIPs with nothing on them (or just a list of social links). Not everyone is cut out to keep a personal site, much less make it pretty or fill it with engaging content. Many people just aren't motivated enough by the prospect of creative expression in that medium or by any of the other reasons Cheapskate gives elsewhere. You can also totally have a website that you only update once every few months or so if what's on it is evergreen. Some of the anti-Big Tech sentiment rings hollow when you're putting hit/view counts on a pedestal and insisting on calling published stuff "content."
That said, their optimism is energizing.

Interesting perspective. I agree in part. I don't think one can spare encouraging people to make websites AND also complain of low-quality site abundance when they do. Or, I mean, perhaps you can, but then it should not be used as some kind of argument for deterring people. If anything, it should be used to light an even greater fire in a person, like saying: "Look around! Are you going to be another example to add-on to the pile and heaps of mediocrity, or are you going to struggle? To persist, for the chance of maybe being a little more?". I speak here from the idea of someone trying to convince people to make sites, please know that I'm not saying or believe this is the only reason to make a personal website.

I don't believe the abandoned sites / WIPs are a problem. I'd rather have them than not. Everyone starts somewhere. And anyone trying to convince people to join this hobby would be unwise to play gatekeeper, imo.

As for the content, whatever floats the person's boat, no? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

We had this discussion in the Do you care about owning your space on the web?, and everyone has their feelings, but I'm of the opinion that you're a little silly if you think joining the personal web is going to do your numbers / hits / views / followers / attention / fame / money / legacy. If you're here for that: 1. I don't think you're doing it, right. And 2. Even if you somehow start off genuine, how long until your "dance with the devil" relinquishes your soul to him? There's a point where your "personalness" is a liability. You sell-out.

Which brings up the most worthwhile reason to have a personal site imo: the autonomy and relative independence from being tied down / pushed around. If you play ball with society / corporations / pop-culture / majority opinion AND you want numbers... I have to question: What are you doing here?

 

[Regal]

Some of the anti-Big Tech sentiment rings hollow when you're putting hit/view counts on a pedestal and insisting on calling published stuff "content."

Neocities and similar communities are pretty good about not caring about people seeing it and/or monetization. They enjoy simply creating something. They also enjoy not being a product to be sold on social media.

And to be fair to Yesterweb they preached this same anti-"content" sentiment.

 

[Dolfin]

Interesting perspective. I agree in part. I don't think one can spare encouraging people to make websites AND also complain of low-quality site abundance when they do. Or, I mean, perhaps you can, but then it should not be used as some kind of argument for deterring people. If anything, it should be used to light an even greater fire in a person, like saying: "Look around! Are you going to be another example to add-on to the pile and heaps of mediocrity, or are you going to struggle? To persist, for the chance of maybe being a little more?". I speak here from the idea of someone trying to convince people to make sites, please know that I'm not saying or believe this is the only reason to make a personal website.

I don't believe the abandoned sites / WIPs are a problem. I'd rather have them than not. Everyone starts somewhere. And anyone trying to convince people to join this hobby would be unwise to play gatekeeper, imo.

As for the content, whatever floats the person's boat, no? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

We had this discussion in the Do you care about owning your space on the web?, and everyone has their feelings, but I'm of the opinion that you're a little silly if you think joining the personal web is going to do your numbers / hits / views / followers / attention / fame / money / legacy. If you're here for that: 1. I don't think you're doing it, right. And 2. Even if you somehow start off genuine, how long until your "dance with the devil" relinquishes your soul to him? There's a point where your "personalness" is a liability. You sell-out.

Which brings up the most worthwhile reason to have a personal site imo: the autonomy and relative independence from being tied down / pushed around. If you play ball with society / corporations / pop-culture / majority opinion AND you want numbers... I have to question: What are you doing here?

I should clarify that I don't think WIPs are a problem either, just a natural consequence of putting web publishing tools in a lot of people's hands. There are quite a few examples of sites that use these tools with interesting results. Some will use those tools for exactly one week and then disappear. So it goes.

Neocities and similar communities are pretty good about not caring about people seeing it and/or monetization. They enjoy simply creating something. They also enjoy not being a product to be sold on social media.

And to be fair to Yesterweb they preached this same anti-"content" sentiment.

Yup, most Neocities folks aren't about views and such. They're delighted when they get them and carry on happily even when they don't. It's great.
I'm fine with sharing that quality with Yesterweb. I don't want to subconsciously think about my or anyone else's work as having the same definitions of success as a product. Specifically, though, my gripe with it here is that the article makes it sound like getting a ton of views on personal sites is a near-term goal for a thriving small web. I agree that there need to be more webmasters, I disagree that views should be the metric of success.

 

[Dolfin]

Another postmortem:

what happened to yesterweb?​

I stopped keeping up with the Yesterweb forum thread, so my reaction to most of what Madness started going on about is "what the actual fuck."
>join a hobby group with unexpected popularity
>owner doesn't know how to handle it
>convince owner that marxism is the only answer
>don't tell anybody about this because it should be obvious that marxism is the only answer
>it apparently isn't obvious
>destroy the entire hobby group instead of risking it continuing to be popular and also not marxist
Kinda mad.

 

[Dolfin]

But that's not a problem, right? I mean having a lot of "junk" websites with "nothing on them (or just a list of social links)". The internet is pretty fucked up as it is, try searching for something in a major search engine (Bing, Google) and you will get absolutely no useful results. So is there really a problem that X made a Neocities website where he put a photo of his cat and links to his peers and won't update it for a year?

I don't think so, the internet, as fucked up as it is, needs more personal websites, even ones that are just the beginning. Like @Eden says, everybody starts somewhere.

Write, people, write. Only takes a notebook (the physical kind), a computer or a phone and firing up some of those those neurons. Make websites. "Spam" them everywhere. Join webrings. Tell us about what you did today, what music you listened to, what movies made you tick. Ask questions. Answer questions. Share links.

The internet is a fighting ground, we're fighting a war here for OUR own corner of the internet, and everything is permitted in wars. Fuck Google, fuck Meta, fuck the big corporations, give me more of the personal side of you, no matter how insignificant you consider it to be.

Correct, it's not a problem, and agreed, people need to make shit, anything. Doesn't matter if you think it's too banal or brief or whatever. Looking back, I wasn't clear in my post that my issue was with the article characterizing site abandonment as a problem.

 

[handoferis]

Another postmortem:

what happened to yesterweb?​

called it.

pretty much everything involving marxists ends up either turning into a weird cult, imploding, being entirely irrelevant - or all three!

looks like the 'DiGiTaL gUeRiLla' who decided they were gonna co-opt dumb hobby shit was going for the 'weird cult' ending, but couldn't get it because of the sheer mass of relatively normal people involved, so opted to go straight for implosion.

and then, by proxy, you get the other potential ending.

textbook!

 

[Voicedrew]

How much work does it take to moderate a DISCORD server exactly?

Moreover, Discord? That doesn't exactly seem like its in the spirit of "yesterweb" to me.

 

[handoferis]

How much work does it take to moderate a DISCORD server exactly?

Moreover, Discord? That doesn't exactly seem like its in the spirit of "yesterweb" to me.

internet marxists are famously allergic to work that isn't just spewing yards and yards of pointless words at each other

 

[UCD]

I stopped keeping up with the Yesterweb forum thread, so my reaction to most of what Madness started going on about is "what the actual fuck."
>join a hobby group with unexpected popularity
>owner doesn't know how to handle it
>convince owner that marxism is the only answer
>don't tell anybody about this because it should be obvious that marxism is the only answer
>it apparently isn't obvious
>destroy the entire hobby group instead of risking it continuing to be popular and also not marxist
Kinda mad.

Reading that thread was crazy. Madness having that much obvious contempt for people that just wanted to make a community left me so confused.

called it.

pretty much everything involving marxists ends up either turning into a weird cult, imploding, being entirely irrelevant - or all three!

looks like the 'DiGiTaL gUeRiLla' who decided they were gonna co-opt dumb hobby shit was going for the 'weird cult' ending, but couldn't get it because of the sheer mass of relatively normal people involved, so opted to go straight for implosion.

and then, by proxy, you get the other potential ending.

textbook!

Somehow they never get around to actually doing anything or helping anybody.

 

[Orlando Smooth]

Which brings up the most worthwhile reason to have a personal site imo: the autonomy and relative independence from being tied down / pushed around.

Given that webhosts took down websites for wrongthink in the post-2020 world, I'm not sure this is something that can be relied on anymore. This was a major contributing factor to my views on the future of the internet becoming so jaded; big tech literally banned the president of the US (but allows dictators, despots, Islamic extremists, etc.) and took down Parler because too many people there were expressing the wrong views. To be clear, I thought those people were idiotic and completely wrong, but eliminating the platform itself really struck me as a bridge too far. I put my two cents in the ownership thread, and this is a major contributing factor to why I wish you could own your own space. You can code your site 100% from scratch, run it on servers you own in your own basement, and outside forces can still make it functionally impossible to access because you don't own the "land" that your site is built upon.

The golden age of the internet ended quite a while ago, and I really don't think we've seen the worst of it yet. Everything is either part of some ideological crusade that will inevitably struggle to gain traction and succumb to infighting (see: this entire thread), or it gets swallowed up by the big tech blob and turned into a soulless content farm.

 

[Some_porcupine]

DISCORD

idk, i liked it back in 2018 or so, then idk its just me or - they "sell-out"?
from niche app, to big soc-med

btw, wanna make agora road (users) webring?

 

[Voicedrew]

btw, wanna make agora road (users) webring?

Sounds like a good idea. Maybe we should make a thread for interested people to contribute.

 

[Hadrian Hardrada Cicero]

Given that webhosts took down websites for wrongthink in the post-2020 world, I'm not sure this is something that can be relied on anymore. This was a major contributing factor to my views on the future of the internet becoming so jaded; big tech literally banned the president of the US (but allows dictators, despots, Islamic extremists, etc.) and took down Parler because too many people there were expressing the wrong views. To be clear, I thought those people were idiotic and completely wrong, but eliminating the platform itself really struck me as a bridge too far. I put my two cents in the ownership thread, and this is a major contributing factor to why I wish you could own your own space. You can code your site 100% from scratch, run it on servers you own in your own basement, and outside forces can still make it functionally impossible to access because you don't own the "land" that your site is built upon.

The golden age of the internet ended quite a while ago, and I really don't think we've seen the worst of it yet. Everything is either part of some ideological crusade that will inevitably struggle to gain traction and succumb to infighting (see: this entire thread), or it gets swallowed up by the big tech blob and turned into a soulless content farm.

Let's be frank, Old Internet died in 2013 and new internet was born in 2014. Shaping up to be a censorious hellscape and this become apparently by 2016 when, after all of those white pencil neck pushovers, protesting, rioting, and thinking what makes them feel good or whatever (see here: SJW Movement) ended up getting hired and wound up getting into higher positions within these companies, influencing the behavior of these bodies into their favor. I think people have forgotten that whatever happened back then, didn't just disappeared overnight, they're still around. Just in higher positions of companies and government.

Semi-offtopic but while I was reading the article @Eden posted on 5/31/23, the article linked to a subreddit where one user criticized the people behind yesterweb. I found this little nugget here.

I giggled.

 

[Some_porcupine]

I giggled.

mission accomplished: newbies scared off: just dont be snowflake and go with vibe

 

[mydadiscar]

mission accomplished: newbies scared off: just dont be snowflake and go with vibe

We have managed to scare off at least one newfag, plebbitors no less, I consider this an absolute win

 

[Still a Youth]

Time for snowflake chads to skedaddle

 

[hyprstorm]

the guy who called us nazis probably saw the thread here about fishtank and searched up who sam hyde is