Name one small change that would ruin the retro web for you

[shevek]

I would make you watch ads before you can access a site on Neocities, or the forum

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[Melooon]

or the forum

Ohhh hmmmm; this is an idea Maybe not ads.. but I could redirect all outbound forum links to a mystical pool that you must contemplate before proceeding!

You'd have to sit perfectly still and not move your mouse for a full 30 seconds; otherwise it deems you unprepared and resets!

[SilkSkull]

Ohhh hmmmm; this is an idea Maybe not ads.. but I could redirect all outbound forum links to a mystical pool that you must contemplate before proceeding!

You'd have to sit perfectly still and not move your mouse for a full 30 seconds; otherwise it deems you unprepared and resets!

You can visit my site only after you have pondered my orb 

I'd make neocities have a subscription sevice in order to be used. No removing it because I want users websites just to show an error message when they haven't paid just to make it that much worse 

[Melooon]

'd make neocities have a subscription sevice in order to be used.

Or better yet; Neocities could move to a new "shared success model" where once you get more than 100,000 hits you have to pay them 20c per hit (based on the Neocities internal hits algorithm that no one actually understands)

[SilkSkull]

Or better yet; Neocities could move to a new "shared success model" where once you get more than 100,000 hits you have to pay them 20c per hit (based on the Neocities internal hits algorithm that no one actually understands)

delightfully evil   

[Memory]

having to pay to use css on neocities.

[wygolvillage]

These ideas are truly evil. Here's mine:

After an influx of new users who don't understand HTML and complain about it being too hard, Neocities shifts to a model where you can only edit your site via a squarespace/carrd/canva style interface.

[Kallistero]

HTML is now PROPRIETARY. No more customization!    Web pages can now only be built from a set of just-somewhat-customizable components. If a site conforms, it'll be converted over, and if the site doesn't conform, it'll delete everything that couldn't be converted.

Conveniently, though: social media, corporate sites, and other sites keeping with the current washed-out minimalism trend will be pretty unaffected. It'll mostly just affect sites that are old, personal sites, sites that aren't the most trendy (like classic-style forums & joke pages), and sites that have otherwise been creatively designed.

[Turboblack]

if we talk about changes in the network - I would tighten the standards and ban strange graphic formats (aren't those that were in the 90s enough?).

.webp ? no! only gif jpg and png

[drmollytov]

"Require a Facebook login" and "HTML is now proprietary" are far better (evil-er?) than what I had in mind, which is:

Every site is written entirely in Javascript.

Imagine the load times! Imagine the popups! Imagine never being able to load anything on an old machine or slow connection! (Or just go to the commercial Web and experience the abuse yourself.)

[Skykristal]

removing HTML/CSS builders entirely. You can only select from 3 pre-built layouts that you can slightly alter with a different font and banner. Just like how most social media profiles work. Every website would look the same but different image and writing. I would also put ads in between as you scroll and explore a site, as well as a big red banner telling you how amazing it would be if you buy the 20 bucks a month subscription to get rid of it. But, even better, you need to subscribe and pay per website, won't remove the ads for all of them.

[haumeaGeth]

Wow okay this thread gave me heartburn.

My mischief would be poorly functioning popup ads. You know, like those on every single cooking site on the commercial web. The kind where, for some reason, closing the ad slingshots you back to the top of the webpage that you just spent the past three minutes scrolling through, trying to find the actual recipe somewhere amongst the drivel about how this pasta cured the author's mom's dog's counsin's chakra cancer. The ads continue to pester you for another five minutes, and when you finally reach the recipe, you find that the only seasonings used are salt, a single grain of pepper, and Cool Whip.

I need a pepcid.

[BlazingCobaltX]

Having a maximum amount of clicks you can make on a website per day. You want to continue reading the website? Too bad! You have to make do with just the About and Links page for the next 24 hours. And yes, there's one 24-hour counter for ALL sites on Neocities.

[candycanearter07]

having to pay to use css on neocities.

That's just how most page builders work by default, and I hate it. so much.

Ohhh hmmmm; this is an idea Maybe not ads.. but I could redirect all outbound forum links to a mystical pool that you must contemplate before proceeding!

You'd have to sit perfectly still and not move your mouse for a full 30 seconds; otherwise it deems you unprepared and resets!

That seems like a fun gimmick to "lock" a specific page behind! Of course, phone users would be unaffected..

HTML is now PROPRIETARY. No more customization!    Web pages can now only be built from a set of just-somewhat-customizable components. If a site conforms, it'll be converted over, and if the site doesn't conform, it'll delete everything that couldn't be converted.

Conveniently, though: social media, corporate sites, and other sites keeping with the current washed-out minimalism trend will be pretty unaffected. It'll mostly just affect sites that are old, personal sites, sites that aren't the most trendy (like classic-style forums & joke pages), and sites that have otherwise been creatively designed.

If big social media really did find the indie web movement a threat, I'm sure that would be exactly what they would lobby to do. That seems in their playbook of "plausibly deniable but conveniently only affects my enemies" that companies tend to do.

[xwindows]

Since you're asking about retro web specifically....

imagine you were an evil trickster demon or something ( ) on the mission to completely ruin the retro web/simple web for its users. The hiccup: you can only change one tiny thing about how it works. What would it be?

Force every websites to require HTTPS, i.e. encrypt against choices.

Unfortunately, this is not a hypothetical what-if anymore: it has already been ruining the web since last decade because Google (ab)used their power to bury the site deep in search result if it refused to encrypt against users' choice; thus pressuring webmasters to bow down to this policy or be lost in the endless ocean of the Internet-- never to be found by "normies" again.

Plan old unencrypted HTTP is the thing which guarantee that any WWW browsers and each WWW server across the entire version range since the late 1990s (1), no matter of hardware/software platform it run, can communicate to each other and exchange information. Barring actual uses which secrecy was essential, like online banking/shopping, logging in with username/password, or showing encryption key information; sites ought not discriminate against their viewers on the basis of availability of encryption, to achieve the goal of universal availability of information.

HTTPS should be available, but NOT mandatory.

I am old enough to witness the phase out of SSL 3.0, TLS 1.0, and TLS 1.1; as well as getting affected along with whole swath of browsers and platforms that became cut off from the web in collateral. And now, some pundits even try to push to obsolete TLS 1.2 (the newest version I could use) despite no serious security breakage happening that would make it invalid for security use, i.e. phasing out wholly because of techno-fashionista reasoning.

I could no longer read All The Tropes since the middle of last month exactly because of this. I haven't tried to contact them about it yet, because I'd have to change machine to do so.

Many servers are also configured to reject TLS connection for the most petty reason possible, such as when client also said it supported older protocol version alongside with the new one. (This caused a lot of problem with clients that do support the necessary TLS version but don't provide configuration option to disable older versions) And these doesn't even account hairy issues of ciphersuite incompatibilities that caused something like Opera 11.51 to fail on many websites despite it being explicitly configured to use only TLS 1.2, because it only supported ciphers running in traditional CBC mode.

I also remember the ISRG's Lets Encrypt root certificate trust changeover from years ago, which also barred several generations of mobile devices off the web as well; generating a tsunami of e-waste in the process.

Mandatory-TLS is an upgrade treadmill, antithesis of simplicity, and a bane of technological longevity.

It must be terminated.

P.S. And to my great chagrin, Gemini protocol mindlessly copied this encrypt against choice mentality, and inherited this ugly flaw. Instead of being a new protocol which would do the right thing in ensuring proper backward+forward compatibility through time, it puts artificial barrier to discriminate against retrocomputers and old software platforms from the start. Thus for this reason, in the realm of non-mainstream Small Internet protocols, I advocate for the old-school Gopher, and against the newfangled Gemini.


(1) I stressed the late-1990s cutoff specifically, because that was when the transition between the nonexistent client support for HTTP `Host:` header, to its mandatory inclusion in HTTP/1.1 took place. Without this header, shared hostings would become inaccessible.