[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Whatever happened to exploring the internet?
___________________________________________________________________
Ask HN: Whatever happened to exploring the internet?
I seem to have collapsed down to checking 5 to 6 sites. Where
would I even go to find other sites that might be of interest? I
can't even really think of any other sites to visit. Whatever
happened to the idea of "exploring the Internet"?
Author : mickjagger
Score : 78 points
Date : 2021-10-24 09:00 UTC (2 days ago)
| Kovah wrote:
| I asked myself this question about a year ago. There are a lot of
| sites similar to Stumbleupon, but all of them were exhausted
| quite fast or had the same sites listed. That's why I built my
| own internet discovery website based on what I remembered from
| Stumbleupon. https://stumbled.to
| dorchadas wrote:
| Thank you! I loved StumbleUpon, so I'm glad to see this around.
| ted0_2021 wrote:
| This looks/works really well. Good job!
| dash2 wrote:
| Counterpoint to all the gloom.
|
| Most interesting content is indeed either
|
| (a) on 5 or 6 sites, or linked from there (b) on professional
| news or media websites
|
| This is because only a tiny proportion of people have the skills,
| or need, to build their own website with their own domain. 99% of
| people - including 99% of people with interesting things to say -
| will say them on Facebook, Twitter, Medium or Substack. Then
| there are people paid to be interesting. You'll find them on the
| NYT, or (for my region) the Eastern Daily Press.
|
| This is fine! Web browsers are read-only. Certain websites, built
| on the web, provide services for writing. People use them.
| rootsudo wrote:
| This also is revealing - maybe it is time to create a blog
| after all.
|
| Many people do give up on computer problems if they take longer
| than a few minutes to solve, or do not want to spend time
| piecing together fragments together, domain, hosting, dns,
| email, etc.
| msoad wrote:
| yes, we just have to accept that those big aggregators won and
| the idea of truly distributed internet did not become a reality
| ergot_vacation wrote:
| Something nobody seems to be mentioning: the 2008 crash happened.
|
| The "cool" internet was largely populated by two things: People
| screwing around creating content in their spare time, with no
| expectation of profit ("Hobbyists"), and eager entrepreneurs
| burning through tons of money trying to find the "one weird
| trick" that would make them rich on the net. Most of #2 failed,
| but while it was happening it provided a host of interesting
| things to see, and spaces to hang out in online.
|
| Then 2008 happened and it all came tumbling down. People tend to
| think more of the 90s ".com" crash, but there was another after
| the "recession." Suddenly there wasn't as much money to throw
| around, so #2 became more and more rare, and those that did exist
| were less casual and more dogged in their attempts to extract
| money. At the same time, #1 also collapsed, because people were
| losing their jobs, downgrading to worse paying jobs, working
| longer hours etc. People didn't have time for hobbies, and self-
| starters didn't have money for wild new experiments.
|
| So innovation and expression on the web kind of ground to a halt.
| This happened culture-wide by the way, but certainly it was
| obvious on the net. What had once been a space for fun and
| experimentation became a wasteland ruled over by the handful of
| tyrannical companies that could survive the harsh conditions.
| That's why there are only 6 sites. Outside of SV, people aren't
| doing so well. They haven't been doing so well in a while. Maybe
| you noticed the protests and riots and crazy elections? People
| have other things on their minds besides having fun on the
| internet these days.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| This trend also applies to music. 2008 put a hamper on the DIY
| scene. It's harder to find the time and resources to make
| music, let alone tour, since many artists, and would-be
| artists, have to work multiple jobs just to pay rent.
| Netherland4TW wrote:
| You might get a kick out of this website:
| https://usefulinterweb.com/ It curates a list of 1000s of
| interesting websites, and adds about 3-4 new links daily
| Cd00d wrote:
| I found the idea of this promising, but the first link I
| followed took me to an Amazon page to buy a book. I feel like
| that's directly taking me out of the useful internet
| experience, as I was expecting content on the topic.
| woodruffw wrote:
| I read a lot of personal blogs. Bloggers tend to link to other
| blogs, so it's somewhat self sustaining. I've seen modern
| approaches to webrings and other reinventions of Web 1.0 sharing
| tricks, but none have really adhered to my habits.
|
| All of that to say: I think it's more about habits (and breaking
| out of the search engine hole) than anything else. It's still
| very possible (and easy) to explore the World Wide Web; you just
| need to overcome the gravity of the big sites.
| wolpoli wrote:
| > Whatever happened to the idea of "exploring the Internet"?
|
| Written content on the Internet are much lower in terms of
| quality than before. SEO has taken over and so written content
| tend to be wordy or salesy. There is no mechanism for users to
| flag low quality content to Search engines or other users, so it
| is a free for all.
|
| Online forums are long gone. People migrated to Reddit where
| discussion is much more shallow, or private communities on
| Facebook.
|
| We could still find interesting stuff on YouTube, for now.
| JohnFen wrote:
| The internet became too risky and aggravating to explore randomly
| a long time ago.
| aaron695 wrote:
| You got old and boring.
|
| REvil and co dump gigabytes of data from random companies each
| week. Have you explored all that?
|
| That's a lot of cool stuff happening with Islamic drones,
| modifying payloads and the like. You could work on those. 3D
| weapons also have an amazing eco system, JStark death barely even
| rated a mention on HN. Hezbollah explorers went into WW1 sunken
| ships in diving dresses to collect explosives to make rockets,
| there's multiple cool things about that.
|
| Get into counterfeit fashion. The Chinese have crossed Kanye
| West's YEEZY Foam Runner with UGG boots, warm and cyberpunk.
| Counterfeit body mod drugs are getting pretty interesting.
|
| Maybe we should add rich to old and boring.
|
| HN is classic dead internet. That's part of the rich problem.
| Fake companies doing fake AI hiring fake IT devs for fake
| ridiculously high amounts of money, it's become in part a fake
| universe.
| pvaldes wrote:
| That would depend on your interests. Try to explore themes in the
| internet instead the internet itself. There is always something
| to discover
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fGJ8MgXkc4
| smoldesu wrote:
| "Web 2.0" was about monetizing everything you could visit that
| might be remotely interesting, and separating you from the
| content with a paywall. We're now looking into "Web 3.0" which
| will bring even more concepts of monetization, ownership and
| client-side computation. It's a mixed bag going forwards, but
| 'exploring the web' died with Web 1.0 as far as I'm concerned.
| hellojesus wrote:
| If you want the experience again, the best way, as others have
| pointed out, is to search via sites and not crawlers -
| specifically community forums or non-crawled aggregators.
|
| If you truly want to experience the frustration of the original,
| pre dominating search engine web, then I highly recommend tor
| sites. Many are not advertised in directories and the only way to
| find them is to find other interesting tor sites. Kind of a
| chicken and egg problem, but thankfully some basic search engines
| and dread exist to get the ball rolling.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| I will sometimes start with a zone file, like com.zone. I search
| for keywords in registered domainnames. Then I filter by
| nameserver (registrar). You would be surprised at how effective
| this can be in finding websites that you would never be able to
| find using simple Google searches. Of course, search engines can
| make this process very easy but they deliberately disable this
| type of exploration. You can query Google's index for a list of
| all websites with domain names that contain a certain keyword,
| but you will never be able to retrieve the full list of results,
| and certainly not in a "neutral" order such as alphabetical.
|
| Arguably a web comprising a large number small, diverse websites,
| where each user may be visiting a variety of different websites,
| is less suitable for advertising than one where all web users are
| funneled through a few large websites that survive by selling
| online ad services, like Google. It stands to reason that those
| large, online ad services sites would have little interest in
| showing users an undiscovered portion of the web. They want users
| to congregate on "popular" sites. Good for advertising.
|
| OTOH, using zone files instead of a search engine, social media
| or news aggregator site in the online ads (or VC) business, one
| can see all websites that have registered an ICANN domain name.
| No filters. No advertising-related algorithms. Popularity is
| irrelevant. The user determines relevance, not a third party.
| mattlondon wrote:
| Fond memories - things like geocities, IRC, forums, and yes even
| web rings were a great way to move around the internet.
|
| I feel like web rings or something like that could be a nice
| thing to have again. I am not sure what format it would take
| these days, but I like the idea of sets of curated sites that are
| "opted in" to being part of a collection.
|
| Apart from that though, I personally find that Hacker News itself
| is a great source - either from the stories themselves, or
| usually the individual comments have some great links.
| southerntofu wrote:
| Planets and webrings are still around, and are a valuable source.
| Other forums and message boards like HN, lobste.rs, tilde.news,
| lemmy.ml and reddit.com are also still doing well.
|
| EDIT: IRC/XMPP/Matrix chatrooms are still doing well, too!
| thrower123 wrote:
| I miss webrings, those were nice for taking random walks through
| related sites. Blogs don't do this much anymore, and outlets like
| Medium and especially Substack keep you inside the walls of their
| author. Browsing geocities or angelfire used to be like taking a
| wiki-walk back in the day.
|
| RSS is still viable, combined with link aggregators and
| newsletters for discovery of new material, but it's a very
| different experience.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| I've put some thought on this topic, and I think the driving
| force between the Internet seeming so small nowadays is a
| combination of changes to how search engines work, as well a move
| from forums to big social media which has meant a shift from
| organic community discovery to being drip-fed content from based
| on what an algorithm thinks will be engaging.
|
| The Internet, as you remember it, still very much exists. Some
| forums have shut down, but there are still small personal
| websites, blogs, all that stuff. They're just really hard to find
| with Google and facebook/reddit/twitter.
|
| Here are some cool and creative things I've discovered recently.
| I have no affiliation with these projects, I just thought they
| were cool:
|
| http://www.lileks.com/
|
| http://dreamcult.xyz/
|
| http://sod.jodi.org/index.html
|
| http://godxiliary.com/
|
| https://www.floppyswop.co.uk/
|
| https://www.dedware.com/
| asciimov wrote:
| Lileks... I've been visiting his site off and on since the late
| 90's. Always something interesting there.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _I think the driving force between the Internet seeming so
| small nowadays is a combination of changes to how search
| engines work, as well a move from forums to big social media
| which has meant a shift from organic community discovery to
| being drip-fed content from based on what an algorithm thinks
| will be engaging._
|
| I think you hit the nail on the head. Google used to prioritize
| forum posts in their search results. They even had a feature to
| limit search results to only forum posts via a "Discussions"
| option on the results page.
|
| These days, Google prioritizes social media content, click bait
| and blogspam that has a lot of ads. The "Discussions" option is
| gone, and even recent forum posts are nowhere to be found on
| the first few pages of search results.
| strikelaserclaw wrote:
| people always go towards laziness and convenience, that seems
| to be a axiom of life.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| I'm not sure I'm convinced about that. The desire for
| convenience may be a widespread cultural message, but I
| wonder if it comes from people and not marketers. A lot of
| people seem to suffer in perpetual convenience, they may not
| be able to articulate it, but it makes them uncomfortable.
| After a while they feel restless and crave some sort of
| meaning in life, something to engage with, an interesting
| idea, a hobby, a project. Some form of work, not for salary
| but to create something or learn something or do something.
| Something real and authentic.
|
| This thread is actually a good example of that, and OP isn't
| the only one who has noted that the Internet seems to have
| turned into a soulless mall where nothing has any effort or
| thought put into it. Well, it hasn't, but when you engage
| with the Internet through certain tools it sure looks that
| way.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Long before MS deprecated "the blue E", you could still "walk the
| web" with Yahoo Categories. Yahoo shut down dir.yahoo.com years
| ago:
|
| https://searchengineland.com/yahoo-directory-close-204370
|
| I don't know if there are any replacements for it.
|
| Most of the archive.org links are still working and the directory
| is still worth exploring:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20140927131133/https://dir.yahoo...
| kradeelav wrote:
| It's still out there, especially when you find webrings that are
| still alive and kicking. I have a links page on my art/personal
| site that links to easily 200+ other artists, organizations,
| webrings, and interesting finds. May you find something
| fascinating enough to click on. :)
|
| http://www.kradeelav.com/link.html
| robotburrito wrote:
| It's basically moved to things like Urbit.
| [deleted]
| quaffapint wrote:
| We could always go back to the 90s when they printed out the
| Internet Yellow Pages. Just pick a random page, point and go
| check it out. Apparently you can still buy it.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Internet-Yellow-Pages-6th-ed/dp/15620...
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| I'll just leave this here...
| kkoncevicius wrote:
| Recently I began "exploring the internet" again with the help of
| a niche search engine that was posted here on HN not that long
| ago [1]. Seems like it returns lesser known, interesting,
| contrarian websites where the authors speak their mind. For
| example I found websites that: speculate that milk and lactose
| might be a hidden cause for several chronic conditions [2]; try
| to re-explain evolution by re-positioning the relationship
| between life, organism, and DNA [3]; rich homepages like this one
| [4];
|
| [1]: https://search.marginalia.nu/ [2]: http://www.nomilk.com/
| [3]: https://bwo.life/org/index.htm [4]:
| http://www.valdostamuseum.com/hamsmith/TShome.html
| bmer wrote:
| A lot of this was painful. I'll comment on bwo.life, since it
| is somewhat close to some of the things I know a little bit
| more about.
|
| > Despite all this life and death, I doubt whether anyone would
| be tempted to describe the embryo's cells as "red in tooth and
| claw". Nor do I think anyone would appeal to "survival of the
| fittest" or natural selection as the fundamental principle
| governing what goes on during normal development. The life and
| death of cells appears to be governed, rather, by the
| developing form of the whole in which they participate.
|
| This is precisely the sort of BS you get when you do not
| participate actively in a field, but instead go off on the side
| to live in your own world. During development, suvival of the
| fittest is very much at play; we have evidence for this, for
| example in the developmental trajectories of stem cell niches.
| Cells outcompete each other, and make it difficult for other
| varieties of cells to "live" along side them (this does not
| necessarily result in apoptosis, it can also cause re-
| differentiation in the less "successful" cells). A crucial
| reason for this is error correction: sometimes, new cells are
| defective in various dangerous ways (e.g. cancerous, or have
| problematic genetic information), and "survival of the fittest"
| helps to error-correct for this, as usually such defective
| cells are "less fit".
|
| What's surprising here is that cells can change their fitness,
| "on purpose", in ways that do not make evolutionary sense. They
| might be programmed to reduce their fitness, or entirely
| explode, if they receive certain inputs. So, clearly this is an
| emergent process where we must take into account cellular
| programming along side "naive" natural selection.
|
| "Old hat" to biologists, really, in that they _have_ been
| studying this. They 're studying it until today. New things are
| discovered all the time. There is no sense of certainty, only
| that there are some general outlines emerging.
|
| Coming back then to this article: saddening, if not disgusting
| in its pretentiousness. Link [4]is even more depressing. I
| don't know if people understand how dangerous quackery is: it
| destroys lives. Most importantly, it destroys the lives of
| children whose parents fall into this.
|
| The broader internet (being difficult to explore given how
| modern internet ecologies box us in) is thankfully not made up
| primarily of this kind of..."garbage", but it is often painted
| as being that way.
|
| So, for anyone who came across this: please don't think the un-
| popular internet is a cesspool of "people speaking their minds,
| in a convenient vacuum". Rather, there are websites where
| people who are humble about their understanding, even if it is
| substantial compared to the average person's. For example: John
| Baez's homepage (https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/) is far richer
| than link [4], and actually gives you useful knowledge.
|
| +Fravia's lore on internet searching (and reverse engineering
| in general) are masterpieces; showcases of what the internet
| can produce, while also working as effective vaccination
| against disinformation:
| http://biostatisticien.eu/www.searchlores.org/indexo.htm
|
| His strategies for how to search for useful information on the
| internet remain relevant today.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Well what do you propose, should search engines be arbiters
| of truth? That would give them a terrifying power over
| society at large.
| kkoncevicius wrote:
| Regarding website [4] - I agree with you, I just showed it as
| an interesting example of what might be found.
|
| But regarding bwo.life, I think you are missing the forest
| for the trees. I read quite a lot of articles on that site
| and your comment in no way disagrees with anything written
| there. Honestly speaking - I got the impression you just
| wanted to highlight some details you happen to know about
| development due to your field of work. And you disagree in
| the first paragraph, saying that there is some natural
| selection between cells. But then, it seems obvious that
| survival of the fittest cells cannot explain development
| alone, so you backtrack and say that this is not the full
| story while somehow remaining in disagreement with the
| author. I don't get it.
| makeworld wrote:
| Check out Gemini.
|
| https://geminiquickst.art/
| [deleted]
| DeathArrow wrote:
| You have the dark web left to explore. :)
| thpetsen wrote:
| I'm using rss/news reader Feedly.com to follow > 100 sites daily,
| most entrys are "marked read" others saved for more close
| reading. The list of sites expand weekly by interesting links
| from sites like hacker news &c.
| [deleted]
| TheMonarchist wrote:
| > I seem to have collapsed down to checking 5 to 6 sites.
|
| I check about 20 sites regularly even when I have other
| interesting things to do.
|
| > Where would I even go to find other sites that might be of
| interest?
|
| Search engines?
|
| > Whatever happened to the idea of "exploring the Internet"?
|
| It sounds like you would like to find lists of recommended sites
| that people used to have on their homepages. Most people don't
| maintain such lists anymore, because 1) nobody reads them 2) they
| are busy pushing updates and consuming those of other people.
| Most people find more interesting stuff than they have time to
| consume already. (Who even needs entertainment industry anymore?)
|
| Also I don't frequent social media, unless HN counts.
|
| Edit: Sometimes when I want _anything_ to read, I search "is
| java dying" or "why c++". There has always been something new,
| albeit I do it only two or three times a year.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| > Search engines
|
| Which search engines in 2021 give you real, interesting
| websites and not SEO gamed content pages that exist only to
| serve ads?
| lolcat_cowsay wrote:
| Gemini's search engine
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Shameless self-promotion: https://search.marginalia.nu/
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| I honestly do think link pages should make a comeback. Websites
| are really bad at linking to each other. It's like they are
| trying to trap their visitors or something and prevent them
| from leaving by having no exits, but no visitor likes to feel
| trapped like that.
|
| It's fun to assemble link lists, it has a sort of scrapbooking
| quality to it, and as long as the links are of high quality,
| they can be very enjoyable to browse through as well. That's
| the benefits beyond the service they provide for the personal
| website ecosystem which is really struggling with serious
| discoverability issues.
| theknocker wrote:
| That was inconvenient for the state dept aka google.
| schemathings wrote:
| The Scout Report has been around almost as long as the Web - I
| visit it occasionally for new inspiration
| https://scout.wisc.edu/report/current
| dang wrote:
| Sorry that this is offtopic, but please don't use celebrity names
| for your username. It's distracting and basically mildly trolls
| every thread you post to.
|
| If you want to email hn@ycombinator.com to change your username
| we'll be happy to do that for you. (Same offer for anyone of
| course.) Until then, I'm going to ban the account for the time
| being since it's the only way to take care of this short of
| renaming.
| smusamashah wrote:
| Who is mickjagger?
| lolsal wrote:
| The internet is bigger and contains more information than ever
| before.
|
| You can't passively explore. You can't go to one or two sites and
| just consume a feed.
|
| Think of interests you have, things you are curious about,
| cultures you want to know more about - and seek those out. That
| is what exploring is: navigating the unknown.
| dusted wrote:
| I think it's important to ignore the commercial part of the
| Internet when discussing this, sure, back in olden days,
| commercial sites interlinked a lot more than they do now, but
| they had to, now they don't.
|
| There's something satisfying in browsing some site, and following
| a link to the next.. That's really what I think of as
| "exploring". Exploring only works when you link to your friends
| sites (and when your friends has sites you can link to) and they
| link back.. The interlinking has probably weakened somewhat, I
| don't know why, but I suspect it to be partly because we've
| gotten so used to link rot, and nobody wants to have a site full
| of dead links..
|
| That said, I still link to others. And I must shamlessly plug
| https://geekring.net/ as a tool for exploring (though, it's only
| about a hundred pages), you could add yours! :)
| rocky1138 wrote:
| It's still there. It's just not popular. I spent quite a few
| hours on IRC when Freenode imploded earlier this year.
| wosb88 wrote:
| When I am in that type of mood I just head to my huge uni library
| and randomly pick a book. No unnecessary jabbering from the chimp
| troupe to deal with, and no wading thro all sorts of scams,
| advertising, self promotion etc. Todays internet just doesnt
| match a nice library.
| gregmac wrote:
| When I was first using the web, it was largely via Yahoo!
| directory [1] results. Most of the interesting sites were
| people's personal sites (with lots of URLs like
| something.edu/~user), and most people maintained a list of links
| to other sites they found interesting -- chances are if you liked
| their site, you'd like most of the ones they linked to as well.
|
| Pretty much all that stuff is just gone now.
|
| The closest thing I do like this today is probably Twitter:
| follow someone interesting, and you'll start discovering
| people/projects/sites/etc they find interesting. Similarly,
| HN/Reddit are maybe the closest thing to randomly browsing the
| "directory", but otherwise everything is via organic search
| results for a specific topic.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Directory
| chomp wrote:
| As the Internet grew, businesses built themselves around it.
| Metrics optimized websites for behaviors that aren't organic. You
| only check 5 to 6 sites because, either unintentionally or
| intentionally, for better or worse, they indulge you in ways that
| the old Internet did not.
|
| Look for communities that are built around the humans in them, vs
| a single company. Web rings, Gemini, IRC are all great places to
| start.
| rocky1138 wrote:
| Internet != The web
| jpindar wrote:
| >Where would I even go to find other sites that might be of
| interest?
|
| Hacker News?
|
| Or Twitter, at least half of my feed consists of people who
| frequently share links to a variety of tech-related sites. Also
| many people have an interesting site linked in their bio. (If you
| prefer just your feed without Twitter's ads and suggestions try
| https://tweetdeck.twitter.com).
| smusamashah wrote:
| Can I equate this with "exploring the computer"?
|
| Windows 98 was the first OS I used, played games on and explored
| internet on. At that time exploring the windows itself use to
| feel fun let alone finding all those new websites. Yahoo and MSN
| were a thing back then for the same reason I think. They were big
| and each had so much to explore and enjoy.
|
| Now days with improved search experience and better internet
| speeds everything is more accessible and there is more of
| everything. You don't have to stick to one thing and explore it
| from A to Z.
|
| I use to explore features of Windows 98 even XP but that all
| stopped and now I don't have those interest anymore.
|
| Maybe your idea of why we are not "exploring" is just maturity
| and growth in this domain. We now don't need to explore like the
| way we use to because we have probably grown out of it.
| wvenable wrote:
| Odd thing to post on Hacker News -- a website dedicated to links
| to all different kinds of websites.
| asciimov wrote:
| Well for starters, we used to call it "Surfing the Internet" not
| "exploring the internet".
|
| The modern web was designed to rope you in and keep you there.
| Look up random stuff that interests you, not using a big name
| search engine. Then if you find a site on a webring, and look at
| connecting sites.
| ape4 wrote:
| You mean Internet Explorer isn't for exploring the internet!
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| A lot of the original metaphors for "using" the internet carry
| connotations of exploration or perusing, but they've been in
| use for so long the meaning has sort of gotten worn off.
|
| Listen to these words and think about what they actually mean:
| Internet _Explorer_ , or Web _Browser_ , even Netscape
| _Navigator_ with its nautical theme has such connotations.
| foobarbecue wrote:
| Haha I'm sure it was "surfing the web" ... I never heard anyone
| say "surfing the internet"
| asciimov wrote:
| You're right, it was never internet. For me it was net or
| web, but it was always surfing.
|
| A little further back it advertising called it the
| "Information Superhighway"
| imarg wrote:
| For some reason this post brought to my mind the website of
| Fravia [1]. It is defunct now (he died 10+ years ago) but it is
| archived and various mirrors exist (have a look at the wikipedia
| page [2]).
|
| I never really got to explore the website in depth but the few
| articles I've read I remember to have been very interesting. More
| important he had some tips on how to make better searches to
| uncover websites that might not be high on the results list.
| Granted this information might be outdated now but I think it is
| worth a look.
|
| [1] www.fravia.com
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fravia
| [deleted]
| jfengel wrote:
| You explored it. That's it. Turns out there's less of it than you
| imagined.
|
| There are, of course, plenty of sites that you could visit. Most
| of them will be incredibly boring. Years ago you found that
| interesting just because it was all new, but you don't any more
| because you've seen similar things already.
|
| I suspect that most of those "5 to 6 sites" are aggregators like
| Hacker News where people seek out new stuff (or at least, new to
| them) and post it. Most of that new stuff is dull, because most
| stuff is dull.
|
| You can always hit up Wikipedia's random link and start
| galumphing about from there.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
|
| I got Guy Nadon, an actor in nothing I've ever seen, though he
| provided French dubbing for some video games I've heard of. Don't
| care? Me neither. That's life. The vast majority of it is dull.
|
| That means it's time to turn off the Internet and go outside.
| chmod775 wrote:
| > I got Guy Nadon, an actor in nothing I've ever seen
|
| How exciting! You might discover a movie or series nobody in
| your bubble has ever heard of! It might be cinema of a kind
| you've never even dipped your toes in!
|
| Whether something is boring or exciting is almost completely
| subjective and it doesn't really matter how much you already
| know, since there's just _so much stuff_.
| dwd wrote:
| There is nothing new under the sun.
|
| It is a high bar to produce something truly innovative and
| different, and not just the same old with a shinier interface.
| Same goes for all the creative arts: television, music, movies,
| art, etc. You always come up against the law of diminishing
| marginal utility so very little ever feels as good as it was to
| begin with.
|
| Do you have a favourite band but now only ever really listen to
| their first few albums? Do the majority of movie releases
| basically not excite you? Can you really be bothered to watch
| season n of some show you enjoyed initially?
|
| The only way to escape that cycle is to be a creator (with
| yourself as an audience of one).
| Minor49er wrote:
| There are a lot of really interesting things on Neocities. Check
| out their Browse section, enter a tag of anything you're
| interested in, set the filter, and check out what's there:
|
| https://neocities.org/browse
|
| I've also been having a lot of fun on minus which is a minimal
| social network that gives each user a lifespan of 100 posts max:
|
| https://minus.social/
| gfody wrote:
| you can still find curated lists especially on github, eg:
| https://github.com/jnv/lists
| tiborsaas wrote:
| Quite a few people thanked me for recommending:
| https://theuselessweb.com/
| throw8383833jj wrote:
| the problem is Search engines suck really really badly at finding
| good sites. I think the war between SEO spammers and search
| engines has been won by the SEO spammers. And the search engine
| filters are now so exclusive that 99% of the good content gets
| filtered out. this has been a growing problem over the last 15
| years but it's getting so bad that even technical searches are
| starting to suck.
|
| Just as an example: in the last few days all i wanted to find was
| a single Dockerfile setup that worked out of the box. and nearly
| every single example I could find in the top 20 results was
| broken.
|
| I mean, try looking up subjects that many people have written
| about. For example: "Why does climate change matter?" Nearly
| every single top 20 search result sucks really bad with barely 3
| to 5 paragraphs not even going into depth. We know for a fact
| there are hundreds of extremely in-depth articles that cover this
| subject with great depth and examples, and explanations.
| cuddlybacon wrote:
| Could it be that your over 30?
|
| There is a problem known as the multi-armed bandit problem[0].
| The problem deals with situations where you have to chose between
| different options you could take, but you don't start off with
| full knowledge of the options. You can spend time learning the
| options (exploring) or you can spend time using the best option
| you already know of (exploit). Importantly, you can't do both at
| the same time.
|
| In general, good strategies start with a phase of exploring
| followed by exploiting.
|
| Humans follow this pattern as well. For us, it seems we spend our
| late childhood, thru our teens, and into our early 20's in a
| heavily explore-biased state then switch to exploit biased for
| our 30's and later.
|
| So the thing that happened to "exploring the internet" is you got
| older. Exploring for the sake of exploring is no longer as
| innately desirable to you know as it was when you were younger.
| You can still do it now. In many ways there are new tools that
| make it easier (see other posts) but it will likely feel more
| like work in a way which wasn't true when you were younger.
|
| [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit
| smusamashah wrote:
| I just wrote an answer to this post and saw your comment
| afterwards. I am over 30 and the pattern I explained in my
| comment all points towards getting older and mature.
|
| Does it mean that young people are still exploring the internet
| and computer today the way I use to back when I was young?
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _Does it mean that young people are still exploring the
| internet and computer today the way I use to back when I was
| young?_
|
| Yes, but they're exploring TikTok, YouTube and to a lesser
| extent, Instagram. There are oceans of content to explore on
| those platforms.
| mrtksn wrote:
| I think you have a point but could it be that after some age we
| simply don't have time to explore because we are required to
| exploit?
|
| I personally know some quite old people who seem to be into
| exploring all the time with periods of exploitation and all of
| them are people with mundane jobs that end when it ends. Their
| mental capacity is at their hobbies and they sometimes invest
| into their hobbies a lot, however they would come up with other
| hobbies all the time.
|
| That's in contrast to the white collar folks who's life becomes
| work and all they do outside of work is to pay for some curated
| experience like vacation to Paris or Cooking lessons. They
| never have time for anything, they deeply specialize at
| something like building systems that catch people engaging in
| known money laundering schemes.
|
| After some age you are in track to specialize a lot, make a lot
| of money and spends that money within the acceptable framework
| with your peers.
| silisili wrote:
| I'm guessing there's a more general name for the concept, but
| drawing a blank.
|
| This is essentially the reason advertisers tend to target the
| young - those over a certain age are more set in their ways and
| not looking for new options.
| IshKebab wrote:
| It's called "exploration vs exploitation". Unless you meant
| the idea that older people need to explore less because
| they're already done it. I don't think there's a name for
| that specific idea.
| cuddlybacon wrote:
| I originally searched for "exploration vs exploitation" but
| that lead to the "multi-armed bandit problem" on wikipedia,
| so I went with that on my post above.
|
| I do that "exploration vs exploitation" is a better name
| for it though.
| ted0_2021 wrote:
| Is there a source or research around humans following this
| pattern?
| cuddlybacon wrote:
| I first encountered it via this book:
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Algorithms-to-Live-By-
| audiobook/dp/B0...
|
| The wikipedia article also briefly mentions that it is
| observed in animals.
| rootsudo wrote:
| Tons, the book "Algorithms to live by" go head first into
| this - https://www.amazon.com/Algorithms-Live-Computer-
| Science-Deci...
|
| It can sound a bit simple at first, but the human - algo
| stories are terrific.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Are there examples that aren't that book (or derived from
| that book)?
| trevyn wrote:
| Interesting hypothesis.
|
| My personal experience is that I've shifted away from
| "exploring the Internet" to exploring other domains of lived
| experience. I suppose in this sense, I am now "exploiting the
| Internet", but I would not say that I have _overall_ shifted to
| a more exploit-focused regime.
| mikewarot wrote:
| Here's a tortious causal chain that I think explains everything.
|
| Computing evolved up the point of Multics. The military has
| always been a driver of computing research to some extent. The
| deployment of computing resources to help plan airstrike missions
| showed a critical need for developing a system in which a single
| computer could handle multiple levels of secure data. The
| research resulted in capability based security, which was in the
| process of being folded into Multics.
|
| The folks at Bell labs happened to have a spare DEC machine, and
| having seen the complexity of Multics, decided to eschew
| capabilities, and instead relied on a much simpler, and quicker
| to implement system based on group and user IDs into Unix. This
| quickly spread to be the defacto multi-user model of security
| across the academic world.
|
| Over time, PCs came to dominate the low end of computing. When it
| came time to implement multi-user and network systems, the Unix
| model, or a slightly upgraded model, based on access control
| lists (as in Windows) effectively ate the world.
|
| Eternal September happened, and the internet went commercial.
| With this, we now have persistent internet, and are stuck with
| the oversimplified security model from Linux and Windows
| dominating everything. As such, no computer is actually secure.
|
| Because computers aren't secure, you can't trust programs that
| run on them to be secure. Because of this, you can't trust the
| web browser on your computer to not get you into trouble if you
| click on the wrong link. This results in a very strong tendency
| to avoid clicking on links from unknown domains and sites among
| the general public.
|
| Because the audience has settled into a few walled gardens, most
| of the authors of content have had no choice but to move to do
| the same.
|
| And here we are, because capability based security is seen as too
| complicated (it doesn't have to be, in fact it can be simple to
| use), we're all stuck with facebook, twitter, etc.
| threatofrain wrote:
| I generally don't like to bring any attention to language, but
| I do wonder if you mean tortious.
| bmer wrote:
| Yeah, I really don't think you should (and neither should I),
| since we're never as smart as we think we are.
|
| The author did not mean tortious, but instead _tortuous_. But
| one immediately gathers this from the context anyway. Who
| cares what the spelling is?
| pessimizer wrote:
| "Tortious" is just as self-deprecating in that sentence. Is
| it an unfair slight to identity-based security systems, or
| a overlong Rube Goldbergian explanation of how the current
| state of the internet came to be?
|
| > Who cares what the spelling is?
|
| People trying to figure out whether an author means
| "tortious" or "tortuous."
|
| I think it's very respectful to the author to make sure
| you're reading what they intended to write. When it comes
| to anything I write/say, please don't separate the art from
| the artist - just ask the artist what he meant to say.
| threatofrain wrote:
| I actually didn't see the now obvious tortious =>
| tortuous. I also thought anyone accidentally using
| "tortious" would want to know.
| foobarbecue wrote:
| Thanks to you I just learned the word tortious!
| enriquto wrote:
| The entry to my particular rabbit hole is to read any wikipedia
| article in math and follow the references up to the primary
| sources. Thanks to libgen and scihub nowadays you can access
| immediately the _whole_ math corpus. You get to read the first
| proof of any theorem you fancy in a couple of clicks. We are
| living in a golden age for historians of math. This is awesome!
|
| It feels really to be "exploring the internet". In a glorious
| quality and extent that I could have never imagined when my dad
| brought home a modem in 1995.
| vimy wrote:
| https://stumblingon.com/
| jimbob45 wrote:
| I was going to say that the death of StumbleUpon really closed
| off whole portions of the web for me. Their algorithms were
| really top-notch and the replacement service isn't worth
| checking out.
|
| Does anyone know why they killed off StumbleUpon? It was
| probably the best part of 2005-2015 for me.
|
| Edit: I like your link but it seems to lack the interest-
| targeting algorithms that SU used to have.
| Kovah wrote:
| I cite my comment from Reddit I posted some time ago
| explaining what happened to SU:
|
| > Stumbleupon had a declining user base because more and more
| spam flooded the site. Moderation couldn't just keep up to
| it. As a result, advertisements were increased to keep up the
| profits from the remaining users. As you might imagine, this
| pushed those remaining users off the site even more. At some
| point, the management decided to put effort into a new
| platform: Mix.com. The CEO also spent a lot of his time
| building Uber (yes, the taxi company).
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