Comment #1606

Hello,

I’ve been a long-time fan of Windows93, and I wanted to react to your article https://href.cool/2010s/ and the ranking you propose.


I found the decision to place whimsy.space above Windows93 a bit puzzling, and I think it reveals an important ambiguity in how “influence” is being defined in the article.


If influence is understood primarily through the lens of design culture, personal authorship, and later career trajectories, then the choice makes sense. whimsy.space is a clearly authored, introspective “web zine as OS”, and the fact that its creator later went on to build Glitch certainly retroactively increases the project’s perceived importance.


However, if we look at cultural and structural influence on the web itself during the 2010s, Windows93 appears significantly more influential. Launched in 2014, Windows93 did not simply propose an aesthetic. It introduced a full alternative web ecosystem several years earlier, including:
* an OS-as-website conceived as a chaotic, explorable environment
* imageboards, chats, forums, and social spaces
* happenings and participatory events
* a MUD
* large-scale media archives and countless easter eggs
* collaborations with many other artists
* and later, a MySpace clone that helped spark the wave of MySpace remakes around 2018


Crucially, Windows93 generated usage patterns, communities, and formats that were widely reused, referenced, and reinterpreted by other projects. It shaped how a whole generation came to imagine “alternative” or “retro-chaotic” web spaces. That kind of downstream reuse is usually a strong indicator of influence.


By comparison, whimsy.space feels more like a refined, personal variation within an already established vocabulary, rather than a project that created that vocabulary. This is not a value judgment on its quality, but historically it suggests inheritance more than origination.


In short, the ranking seems to conflate:
* influence on designers and creative coders
with
* influence on internet culture and practices at large


Under the latter definition, it’s difficult to argue that whimsy.space was more influential than Windows93 during the 2010s.

That said, your ranking is of course subjective, and that subjectivity is entirely valid. In any case, thank you for the article — it introduced me to whimsy.space, which I didn’t know at all before reading it :)