[HN Gopher] The OG Social Network: Other People's Websites
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The OG Social Network: Other People's Websites
Author : headalgorithm
Score : 207 points
Date : 2022-08-04 16:32 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.jim-nielsen.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.jim-nielsen.com)
| t_mann wrote:
| I would love if we went back to more personal websites, but I
| don't see what the catalyst would be. Google reader is a good
| point, it's been 10 years since it's gone and we still don't have
| any replacement in the sense that it's something that non-
| technical people at large would be aware of it. Heck, most people
| don't know what RSS is. Look at Wix, WordPress,... - setting up
| your own site has never been easier, yet so few people do it.
|
| In reality, we're moving to ever simpler UX solutions - TikTok
| doesn't even require searching for and connecting with friends
| before you get your dopamin kicks. The next big network will
| probably be one that's figured out how to continuously serve
| people personalized content without them having to actively like
| anything or make active choices (maybe using pupil dilation or
| whatever).
| HeckFeck wrote:
| > TikTok doesn't even require searching for and connecting with
| friends before you get your dopamin kicks
|
| It is a shame this is how it went. Despite the many ills of
| social media when I was coming of age, the connecting with
| friends and sharing random comments was what made it worth the
| time. It was just another medium of interaction in my
| friendships. If I went back on to facebook, I'd still find long
| threads from those formative days.
|
| Now, the human touch is even further buried amid the endlessly
| funnelled consumption.
|
| I want to be an optimist and say this will strike a peak and
| we'll go rolling back down the hill to user-centred websites
| again.
| mattlondon wrote:
| "...killing Reader to make Plus a success..." What? Do people
| really think that was why they killed reader?
|
| I _strongly_ doubt that there was much overlap between reader
| users and the intended audience for Google+. It 's not like your
| average social media user has ever even _heard_ of RSS yet alone
| use it for anything. Can you imagine anyone on tiktok using RSS
| instead? Of course not.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| Social media is very wide term, and arguably RSS is itself
| social media.
|
| There was in fact an overlap between reader users and the
| intended audience for Google+, lots of bloggers were invited
| and joined Google+ when it was invite only.
|
| I can definitely imagine people using RSS feeds for short
| portrait mode videos, just as people use RSS feeds for
| podcasts. Just as we have podcast players to consume this kind
| of RSS feed, we might have tiktok like apps to consume another
| kind of RSS feed.
| thrown_22 wrote:
| Internet users in 2012 are not the internet users of 2022. 10
| years of devolution have made anything harder than "swipe up
| for more" impossible for the majority to use. It wasn't always
| the case.
| tuxie_ wrote:
| > Perhaps history will conclude killing Google reader killed
| Google, an overly-simplistic conclusion but poetically ironic
| nonetheless.
|
| Or maybe it was an omen to their own decline.
| pocketsand wrote:
| Bring back Web Rings and Link Exchange.
| munificent wrote:
| _> The mistake was killing Reader to make Plus a success.
| Google's judo move would've been to embrace the open web as a
| social network. Not their network but our network._
|
| _> They provide the tools - Reader, Blogger, Search -- we
| provide the personal websites. The open, accessible, indexable
| web as The Next Great Social Network._
|
| I think this confuses the chronology. It's not that Google _drove
| people away_ from a decentralized social web by killing Reader.
| It 's that users _had already abandoned the web_ in favor of
| walled gardens like Facebook.
|
| I think that Google should have kept Reader around largely for PR
| and goodwill reasons, but it was niche product being used by a
| small and dwindling (but fervent!) set of users. RSS was not a
| meaningful "social network" for any significant fraction of
| humanity. I would bet money that for every person who has ever
| written a blog post, there are 10,000+ people who have posted on
| Facebook or Instagram.
|
| Google could have kept the lights on with Reader but it would
| have been a well-lit but empty room.
| wwweston wrote:
| You're right about the basic dynamic -- convenient platforms
| with network effects are always going to have the bigger draw,
| probably by orders of magnitude.
|
| At the same time, though, the value proposition of a social
| networks & media isn't linear with user volume. There's always
| a _floor_ beneath which the value isn 't there, but once you
| meet that bar there's different kinds of value available
| depending on _who_ is participating, what kind of effort they
| 're putting into contributions, and maybe even value presented
| by limitations/exclusivity.
|
| The Reader / Blogger infra could have been an effort to focus
| on high value networks vs high volume networks. Which, you
| could argue, is exactly what the value proposition of Google's
| core product (search) was in the first place.
|
| Blogs _still_ aren 't an empty room, so I think the floor would
| have always been there.
| xhfloz wrote:
| I've been working on this project for a while, trying to get at
| this problem -- https://mmm.page
|
| Feel free to look at some of the pages that people have created:
| https://showcase.mmm.page
| softwaredoug wrote:
| Why do social networks persist as "gateways" to information?
|
| They offer a consistent experience. You're less likely to be
| inundated with the random crap found on a random website. People
| prefer the mediocre, yet consistent, social media "meal" over the
| fancy meal with possible high degree of variability in quality.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| I'll argue social networks are just a bit more than consistent
| gateways.
|
| They are a supernormal stimulus. The algorithm feeds you and in
| many ways hijacks you. There's a reason social networks are
| dead set against chronological feeds.
|
| They give you this steady drip of "engagement" which often
| means playing into strong (and negative) emotions.
|
| You don't get that in a true straight content feed. Sometimes
| content is boring or just not excitable.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| for OOG, I'd say mailing lists: SF-Lovers started ca. 1975, and
| I'm still on a few. (although the subscriberships tend to now be,
| compared to their heydays, in pour-out-a-40 mode)
| swyx wrote:
| i will just point out the mild irony of most of us discovering
| this blogpost... on HN
| hoherd wrote:
| Right? That blog isn't even in a webring.
| superkuh wrote:
| A bit. It all depends on how you use HN. Every time I find some
| interesting site I add it's feed (rss/atom) to my reader
| (QuiteRSS). Usually stuff on HN has a feed.
| t_mann wrote:
| Well, HN comments are indexed, and HN itself links to >90%
| third-party websites. Aggregators like HN would likely be part
| of an (itself unlikely) resurgence of individual websites. It's
| like an interactive version of the old Yahoo.
| rakoo wrote:
| It's not that ironic, because the fuel for our comments is all
| the websites. We use HN to discuss but the vast majority of
| content is outside HN.
|
| Unless you consider HN comments to be the actual content, like
| many people, me included.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| websites aren't a social network because they're not a network at
| all. there's no genuine connection between the sites apart from
| the occasional accidental link, but websites themselves don't
| interact in any structured way.
|
| The 'semantic web' or RSS, as the article mentions, which are
| protocol-like solutions suffer from three things. The first one
| is that they're slow. Standards for large sets of people are by
| necessity developed through collaboration, and they cannot
| compete with the speed of private products. (point also often
| made by Moxie at Signal)
|
| Secondly, these kinds of internet protocols rely on uniform,
| machine-readable content. Rich, personalized, app-like
| experiences are hard to index, Search engines are starting to
| suffer from this, it's a reason everyone puts "reddit" at the end
| of the search and tries to get the opinions of people, and why
| they're not super relevant in China which leapfrogged the 'plain
| text' internet into private platforms.
|
| Thirdly with protocol based solutions there's no good answer or
| even incentive to make sure the information is correct or
| protected, this was one of the major problems of the semantic
| web. Spammers, attention seekers, fraudsters and so on can game
| these systems with impunity, siloed company-controlled platforms
| can fend these bad actors off.
|
| I think each one of these is a deep, structural issue and I
| haven't really seen a solution to any of these by people who
| still advocate for returning to individual sites, and I think the
| trend in what people consume points into the other direction.
| chomp wrote:
| Agree with your whole comment except the first sentence. When I
| was in a webring years ago, I'd interact with my ring-mates
| pretty often.
| chazeon wrote:
| Then HN/Reddit become the social aggregator Google Reader never
| get to be.
| haskell_melody wrote:
| The hard part is finding the interesting websites - there is such
| a firehose of content that we've necessitated a separate role for
| content curators.
|
| I get Thinking About Things, which points me to interesting sites
| on the internet (https://thinking-about-things.com/). Another
| great one is Findka essays (https://essays.findka.com/). Would
| love to hear any other recommendations.
| iam-TJ wrote:
| Web-rings [0] were a good way to do that discovery of allied
| sites back in the day.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring
| HeyItsMatt wrote:
| Google and Bing (and hence DDG etc) are no longer a search
| engines, they're "information the powers that be permit you to
| have" engines. Forums, blogs, and small independent websites
| have disappeared from indexes. Large walled garden platforms
| like Facebook are impossible to query.
|
| We really need a replacement for Yahoo.
| haskell_melody wrote:
| Wish there was something like Read Something Interesting
| (http://readsomethinginteresting.com/) but with a search
| index, where you could search only the blogosphere.
| DMell wrote:
| The first item I was taken to on that list is this:
| https://readsomethinginteresting.com/a/baa96b89
|
| Which takes me to a broken article:
| https://www.aaronkharris.com/asking-questions
| srcreigh wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20210113145204/https://www.aa
| ron...
| Melatonic wrote:
| .....what? What forums have dissapeared from Google? I get
| and search forum results all the time. This is not including
| of course the forums that have gone private or purposely
| delisted themselves
| HeyItsMatt wrote:
| I can't surface them at all for non-programming sites.
| Occasionally automotive, but it's still mostly AI generated
| made for adsense junk. I can use site: filters on sites I
| know about, but I can't find anything on a page I don't
| know that way. Your filter bubble may be different.
|
| I mostly use Yandex now. It's not great.
| jacooper wrote:
| I find Brave search to be a lot better. Its result are
| helpful, and not filled with SEO spam.
| HeckFeck wrote:
| I certainly notice this too. I remember searching for
| technical queries and would find many (not SEOsplurge) blog
| posts or random forums where the question is discussed. Now
| it is just the same stackoverflow answer replicated across
| multiple content farms.
|
| Peculiarly, I have found the more 'genuine' websites by using
| image search. Perhaps because more things fit into a grid,
| and I can usually gauge whether the website is genuine or a
| botfarm from the images its author chose.
| snthd wrote:
| https://www.curlie.org
|
| https://www.curlie.org/docs/en/about.html
| pphysch wrote:
| Is this true?
|
| If I search "presstv", the .com site of which was literally
| seized by the US govt, I get their unseizable .ir site as the
| first result. No scary warnings, no fluff.
|
| If I search "rt", I get RT site as the first result.
|
| Similarly for smaller sites that have caught flak or been
| banned for opposing US government narratives (SCF, CN, GZ,
| etc).
|
| Ironically, it's "open" platforms like Wikipedia that have
| the lowest tolerance for political dissent. Twitter, Facebook
| are quite compromised as well.
| mawise wrote:
| Discovery has become the one thing that our social networking
| overlords do and focus on. But we learned about new things
| before them just by talking with our peers. I think the
| IndieWeb's concept of a Social Reader[1] can do a great job of
| filling this need. If you like or comment on something in your
| feed-reader, it becomes a post on your outgoing feed that
| people can see. This lets any individual or site act as a
| source for curated content.
|
| [1]: https://indieweb.org/social_reader
| kradeelav wrote:
| https://search.marginalia.nu/ is a fantastic curated search
| engine for just those sites you're looking for. :)
|
| alternatively, the bookmarks/links page to mine has a hefty
| list of artist-focused sites (http://kradeelav.com/link.html),
| and the yesterweb webring has enough to get you going in the
| fun quirky webrings - https://links.yesterweb.org/
| whatever1 wrote:
| TikTok changed all of that. Now we have networks of interest. The
| individuals do not matter. Labels of their content are now the
| drivers.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| I don't see any reason why we can't have a tiktok like
| recommendation engine for the web. (In fact I think that's what
| bytedance started with[1]? Would be very interested in using an
| english version of that, maybe RSS based.)
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toutiao
| chriswarbo wrote:
| No idea about TikTok (never used it, or
| Twitter/Facebook/MySpace/etc.); however, that sounds similar to
| the "groups" feature of Identi.ca (now GNUSocial).
|
| I always preferred that way of interacting, since I prefer to
| see what anyone says about a topic, rather than everything said
| by some individuals.
| klez wrote:
| Or subreddits on Reddit, for that matter.
| ladzoppelin wrote:
| The quote about Google reader really hit home but I had no idea
| they were still killing so many services:
| https://killedbygoogle.com/
|
| Don't they want to be the biggest cloud provider by a specific
| year or something, why would anyone use this company for
| something as important as cloud infrastructure?
| philip1209 wrote:
| I remember MySpace being described as "an easy personal website"
| back in high school.
|
| Unfortunately, it's not easy to make an easy personal website
| today. Personal sites take so much work to design, and most feel
| stale because they don't have dynamic content like posts.
| About.me used to be great, but it didn't get maintained.
|
| I'm working on a project to make personal websites as easy to set
| up as a social profile. No designs to pick - just a photo and
| profile photo. Not static - you have a mailing list and the
| latest post is shown on the homepage. And, people can "follow"
| with their emails.
|
| Facebook used to be pitched as "the place everybody is", but
| that's no longer true - social networks are getting dis-
| aggregated. So, I expect personal sites to become a way for
| people to gain more control over their audiences, and to help
| move an audience from one platform to another (via a "link in
| bio" to their personal sites)
|
| If you're interested in trying out my project for your own site:
|
| https://postcard.page
|
| (Will trade free access for feedback!)
| deepdriver wrote:
| I'd like to see a project like this which is self-hosted, where
| the process of buying a domain, acquiring hosting, etc. is made
| easy for non-technical users. The problem with sites like
| about.me is that eventually the maintainer gets acquired, gets
| bored, gets hit by a bus, etc. With a self-hosted site, it
| works as long as you keep paying Namecheap and AWS, for
| example. This arrangement also separates the core project
| owners from responsibility for whatever users slap on their
| page down the line.
|
| I imagine users would go to one site (or app) to get it all
| running, and that site would hook them up with hosting and a
| domain name behind the scenes, maybe get them set up with a
| static page through a WYSIWYG editor, then boom done. Maybe
| give users a standalone app with their hosting keys and
| credentials that lets them update the content on their site
| directly (again through WYSIWYG, like Adobe Dreamwaver but
| easier), without going back to the initial setup site.
|
| A platform or service that handholds users through initial
| setup and billing, and then steps away once they're up and
| running, seems to me like the right mix of centralized/devolved
| control and responsbility. I realize what I'm describing sounds
| a lot like Wordpress or Dreamwaver, but I think there's a big
| opportunity to slim down these offerings into a simple, secure,
| easy-to-use package. I guess it depends on your choice of
| target audience.
| philip1209 wrote:
| Email sending is surprisingly hard to get right. That's where
| a lot of the value for a hosted product comes from.
|
| With Postcard - I've had to add various checks and
| protections to prevent bot abuse (and to manage sender
| reputation). It would be really hard to be reactive like that
| on a self-hosted product.
| deepdriver wrote:
| Is it more or less the same problem as running a GNU
| Mailman listserv in 2022? That is to say, a fairly hard
| problem of staying on top of security patches, avoiding
| getting marked as spam, and avoiding getting put on the big
| email provider's badlists. In theory, the problem seems
| simple: replace a manually-managed BCC list with an alias
| to said list, so it's less hassle for the user/sender.
| Maybe the answer is an email client plug-in that just
| autofills BCC to-addresses? Assumption would be the user's
| sending this email from a known provider like GMail or
| Fastmail.
|
| I imagine it would be easier for the completely self-hosted
| email system if signup gave receivers a from-address they
| could whitelist, if their email provider allows it. Maybe
| you already do this.
|
| Edit: I'm also assuming email is sent one-way to whoever
| signs up, maybe with a link to the dynamic chat
| server/app/platform of the moment. Slightly different from
| a GNU Mailman list, which enables back-and-forth
| conversation.
| Melatonic wrote:
| Totally willing to do feedback for free access - this is cool
| philip1209 wrote:
| Email me and I'll send a coupon code! mail at
| philipithomas.com
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > Personal sites take so much work to design, and most feel
| stale because they don't have dynamic content like posts.
|
| There's nothing stopping personal sites from interacting with
| Fediverse standards. Then posting to your site is just a matter
| of inputing it as your home "server" in your preferred
| Fediverse app.
| philip1209 wrote:
| P.S. - my personal site (on Postcard) is
| https://www.philipithomas.com
| deepspace wrote:
| Unfortunately, the site crashed for me after uploading a
| background photo, and my test site is now permanently
| inaccessible.
| andreyk wrote:
| Looks cool, but don't things like WordPress already make this
| easy?
| Melatonic wrote:
| Setting up a whole wordpress is actually quite hard for the
| average person. Not to mention they need to also first pay
| and get web hosting.
| happyopossum wrote:
| Based on context, I'd assume GP was referring to
| Wordpress.com, which requires none of that...
| philip1209 wrote:
| My goal is that Postcard can get your site published in
| 2-3 minutes with nice design.
|
| Wordpress isn't built for personal sites. Too many
| themes, too hard to set up, too much overhead. I think
| most people that want a personal site are not motivated
| to figure out the whole process of finding a template,
| designing the pages, configuring all the content
| sections, etc. Plus, Wordpress doesn't have an easy
| mailing list tool built-in.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| A personal website can still be as simple as dumping a single
| HTML file into your hosting provider's folder. Despite
| everything being built up in more complex ways, that hasn't
| changed since the beginning of the internet. In fact the lack
| of web style has seen a little bit of a resurgence.
| philip1209 wrote:
| Yeah, true - but I think the opportunity is a really tight
| integration with a mailing list. I think personal sites need
| some dynamic content - such as posts and a mailing list.
| Otherwise, they just feel stale.
|
| That's what prompted me to start Postcard. I had a blog set
| up, and I wanted an integrated mailing list. It took XML
| hacking (RSS), $30/month to Convertkit, and lots of
| complexity to make it "just work". I wanted something far
| simpler, and built for people instead of marketing
| organizations.
| EddieDante wrote:
| Well, I'm going to keep on being outdated. I've got posts
| and a RSS feed. If you insist on a mailing list then I'm
| pleased to disappoint you.
| hedora wrote:
| What's a decent static site generator for this sort of
| thing today? I'm envisioning a directory of .md's or
| whatever, then I run make, and it invokes a thing that
| builds a tree of .html with an rss feed in it.
|
| Finally, my makefile does an "s3 sync".
|
| The older and more boring, the better.
| corytheboyd wrote:
| I just use Gulp and PostHTML to render markdown, do some
| light templating. It does nothing more than put HTML
| files in a build folder. These tools never change so it's
| been pretty reliable.
|
| I found myself forgetting how static site generators
| work, and barely used any features. I update my site like
| once a year.
|
| Idk its in the JS ecosystem so HN will probably hate it
| lol.
| klez wrote:
| I use pelican[0], which works with markdown (or rst)
| files and makefiles to compile/deploy.
|
| [0] https://getpelican.com/
| rakoo wrote:
| Why not build it yourself ? You'll probably spend more
| time tweaking template anyway. Plus, if you do it
| yourself you won't need anybody to maintain it.
| philip1209 wrote:
| I built https://tinker.fyi using Nuxt.js - their `nuxt-
| content` library is great for having a markdown-based
| CMS.
|
| (I'm also using this stack for managing Terms of Service
| on https://contraption.co and that project is open:
| https://github.com/contraptionco/contraption.co )
| anonymous_sorry wrote:
| For me, what social media has over a personal website is a
| common identity system and access control.
|
| I would like to host my occasional posts and photos on my own
| site. But I don't want to post everything publically.
|
| But requiring people to sign up to my personal website is
| probably unreasonable. And requiring a login implies a DB of
| some kind, which for me transforms it from fun into work.
|
| I'm also not going to get excited about anything that isn't
| self-hosted. Sooner or later every cool startup either fails or
| becomes successful enough that their incentives no longer align
| with my interests.
| tomjakubowski wrote:
| A compromise solution is publishing the post to your website,
| without having links to it from the public side, and sharing
| the URL only with your audience.
| smm11 wrote:
| Blogger/RSS is all we/Google ever needed.
| jjuel wrote:
| Bring back Geocities!
| WaitWaitWha wrote:
| Does Google really want to achieve their stated mission?
|
| I would like to see Search Engine Optimization ended with extreme
| prejudice.
|
| No search engines are immune, but Goog is the epitome of of SEO
| taking over the first few pages, destroying the "information"
| that they want to make "universally accessible and useful".
|
| I am also seeing search results where the first few pages are all
| auto-generated articles, SEO optimized. The content is gibberish,
| incomprehensible word salad. But, it is long enough, linked
| enough, and my keyword and synonyms appear sufficiently enough to
| show up in my search.
|
| Google Reader dying was a sad day indeed. So was usenet dying was
| a sad day. So was the town square post board, and before that the
| town crier.
|
| These are not blocking Goog to achieve their stated mission. It
| is stating such mission, but not doing anything to achieve it.
|
| Talk is cheap.
| [deleted]
| cortesoft wrote:
| How is it possible to get rid of SEO? Search engines have to
| have some mechanism to determine order, and websites will get
| more clicks if they are at the top... those two things together
| will guarantee that sites care about optimizing their
| appearance in search results.
|
| How would you stop that?
| at-fates-hands wrote:
| Anecdotal note on SEO.
|
| I used to be really big into SEO. I used to do things all the
| time by the book. I worked to get really good inbound links,
| worked to find great directories to link from, and was really
| into "white hat" SEO.
|
| Fast forward a few years into the late aughts. Had a client
| who needed a site in less than two months. Some 15 pages of
| content, design, CMS and a new logo to boot. Was going to pay
| me a lot if I could do it.
|
| I got it done and was sweating bullets because I had
| essentially copied all the content on his site from other
| sites in the same industry. I essentially aggregated all of
| the big players content into his site. I was petrified the
| site would get ranked and yanked and I'd spend months trying
| to get the site back into the SERPS.
|
| Guess what happened?
|
| Within a month, the site was outranking all the bigger
| companies in his industry. The site was one page 1 of Google
| in less than 60 days. All the companies he was competing with
| were at the bottom of page 1 or pushed to page 2. It never
| dropped lower than #3 on the first page in Google. The site
| broke nearly every cardinal rule of SEO - duplicate content,
| keyword stuffing, fake inbound links, etc. and still managed
| to be on the front page of Google for a host of long tail
| search terms and has continued to stay on the front page.
|
| It just confirmed Google doesn't care about enforcing any of
| its rules any more. If I did what I did, I can only imagine
| what other people are doing to push their site into the top
| of the rankings.
| codalan wrote:
| I would have thought a Bayesian machine would be able to
| filter out sites that looked too much like autogenerated word
| salad.
|
| Or just exclude all basic pages (e.g. recipe) that insist on
| having a table of contents.
|
| I know that when I'm searching for answers and the page has a
| TOC, 9/10 I close it out.
| lytedev wrote:
| I hate it when pages DON'T have a toc. I wanna see the
| headings with links so I can jump to the part of the page I
| care about. Not scroll through hoping to find it...
| ugjka wrote:
| I just hope that DDG are first to solve this SEO problem
| jacooper wrote:
| They can't, its just a UI for Bing. If you want something
| actually independent, use Brave Search.
| tuxie_ wrote:
| I'm quite happy with the results of you.com (not affiliated in
| any way, just a happy user).
| Theodores wrote:
| It is interesting, most of the SEO nonsense is not because of
| Google, they say words to the effect of 'put the customer first
| and write for them' in their docs and that makes sense.
| Analytics will pick up content not keyword stuffed bulls4it for
| robots.
|
| Just for the lols, put together a site with content, submit it
| to Google and see how many clicks you get. Nobody is going to
| beat a path to your door, even if you are selling 100% pure
| gold blocks for tuppence a kilo.
|
| I could go on AWS and build a website in minutes from a CMS but
| in practice, even if you know you can do that, it actually
| takes a really long time to build and test a website. Even if
| you are not being held back by dysfuntional teamwork and can
| just do it all yourself, in your skill level, it will still
| take a while before that new website is actually working.
|
| Even simple things like email. It probably just works fine out
| the box. But if you then decide you want a proper mail server,
| thinking how hard can it be?, then you will go down a rabbit
| hole. All you want to do is be able to communicate with people
| but you have to learn a mountain of stuff that you would not
| need to know if you just went with Squarespace.
|
| Google have also been very bad at semantic elements. If you
| mark up your docs in divs and spans then that is fine as far as
| Google is concerned. It is what it looks like, not what it is.
| You would think they would like documents that use the more
| meaningful elements such as article, section, aside and so
| forth, but no.
|
| Because of this we have search engines reverse engineering the
| structure and content of pages using mystery AI. Nobody is
| encouraged to do the equivalent of using 'styles' in Word and
| they are doing the equivalent of using Word as a typewriter,
| manually bolding headings rather than using a heading style.
|
| We could have an army of highly literate SEO people essentially
| editing content to make it better for the customer, better
| organised with sensible HTML elements and with better English
| (or other language).
|
| But instead we have an army of people who think that repeating
| words on a page will bump you up the search rankings, which is
| at the opportunity cost of not writing better content.
|
| WYSIWYG editors are also evil, based on an outdated metaphor.
| They don't enable you to logically group your content with
| sections that start with a heading for the screen reader, the
| section scoping the relevance of the heading.
|
| We all have a love hate relationship with Google, but, if you
| look at it objectively, they are not really taking the web in
| the direction Tim Berners Lee had in mind at that content
| level.
|
| I have found that the few blogs that I do read now are like
| discovering the old web, but it is something you have to
| consciously remember to do. Google Reader and RSS really was
| the magic ticket for making it work, not to mention web
| rings...
|
| The thing is that there was never any pressure to get RSS
| working. In a typical agency a decade ago there would be a
| grand effort to put these social network shares on everything
| to drive traffic but the people calling the shots on that never
| really got RSS and never made developers get that working
| nicely. It was not in the project spec but the silly
| Facebook/Pinterest/Tweet links had to be done.
|
| Hence the demise is not just on Google, it is with the snake
| oil cargo cult SEO belief system that has no idea what the
| Google algorithm is, but they think they can second guess it
| better than any developer.
|
| If you can't do then teach. If you can't teach then teach
| Geography. This was once a popular saying. Don't judge.
|
| The modern take: if you can't code then do website design. If
| you can't do website design then do SEO.
|
| A SEO person has the time to look at various Google dashboards
| and to make recommendations. For example, your TTFB is a bit
| high, can we have that lower? The programming team can then say
| 'what do you think we have been working on for the last six
| months?'.
|
| Given where we have come, I would like to see a future where
| everyone hosts their own stuff. By default your home wifi is a
| server load balancer with sufficient oomph to hold anything you
| want to share. Out the box you just put in your URL and there
| you go. No need for AWS or others, your ISP puts your stuff on
| a CDN with your permissions. A soveriegn web.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > Nobody is encouraged to do the equivalent of using 'styles'
| in Word
|
| The main search engines support schema.org for marking up the
| "semantic" data associated with a webpage. Typically, this
| triggers "rich" search results. It goes underused because
| most commercial web sites don't _want_ to make their
| semantics so transparent to outsiders, they would rather try
| to get increased traffic. But this also makes it a potential
| value-added for more grassroots-based websites that will
| generally care less about how much casual traffic they get,
| and more about discoverability for their content.
| scelerat wrote:
| > Other people's websites are the OG social network, and the
| optimist in me is going to riff on MLK's quote: the social arc of
| the internet is long, but it bends towards individual websites.
|
| I agree with the first part, individual websites are the OG
| social network. The second, though, that the "social" web will
| lean towards individual websites seems dubious.
|
| The more "individuality" a given medium enables, the more
| complexity and therefore, difficulty. Most people want to just
| share photos and lulz with their friends, and the the landscape
| of social walled gardens are all trying to tap this demand.
| Etheryte wrote:
| I would say yes and no. For technical and semi-technical
| people, most personal sites and the like offer RSS which is
| universal enough that everyone can consume it their own way.
| For non-technical people however I agree that this doesn't work
| out.
| mawise wrote:
| There are things we can do to make RSS-based consumption much
| easier. I use an RSS browser plugin for Firefox[1] so that a
| feed icon shows up on any page advertising[2] a feed. The
| feed icon let's me subscribe to the site with 2 clicks (and
| no copy/paste). This is a space that is ripe for building
| better tools, especially since so much of the (non-walled)
| internet still exposes RSS. We even have a handful of
| companies getting people to pay $$ for a solid hosted feed-
| reader experience (Feedly, Inoreader, Newsblur, etc.)
|
| [1]: https://github.com/Reeywhaar/want-my-rss [2]:
| https://www.rssboard.org/rss-autodiscovery
| klez wrote:
| > I use an RSS browser plugin for Firefox so that a feed
| icon shows up on any page advertising a feed.
|
| Can you imagine Firefox having such a button without the
| need for a plugin. That would be crazy, wouldn't it?
| jacooper wrote:
| Nah they are spending time making the tabs larger, that's
| more important.
| throwaway14356 wrote:
| Lets not forget news groups. Google had everything to match
| sociaal networks many years in advance.
|
| Youtube also had video replies and threaded discussions before
| they made it impossible to find your conversation and impossible
| to figure out who is responding to who.
|
| plus was a hideous pile of trash. A 12 year old could easily
| design a superior experience. The turd was optimized to gather
| personal data and didn't have anything else.
|
| Wave and Knol looked interesting but who wants their precious
| workflow and writings to depend on a company that will inevitably
| kill it?
|
| What a joke
| podviaznikov wrote:
| absolutely love the site. Also love the stats sections. I used to
| have it on my personal site too https://podviaznikov.com. Going
| to put it back.
|
| I used to have stats about books I've read and trips I've took.
| Definitely putting that back. Also will add that feature to my
| CMS.
| teawrecks wrote:
| Also part of the issue: most new content that people look for
| isn't in text form anymore. It's mostly image and video. Yeah,
| they have YT, but that's not where the younger generations are.
| Google can't (or at least doesn't) index every 5 second tiktok or
| days and days of twitch VODs. Either for legal reasons or because
| it's just too much data that's too difficult to parse usefully.
| For Google's sake I hope it's not the latter.
| madrox wrote:
| When social networks started taking off, in the spirit of the
| late 00s there was a push to create standards for distributed
| social networks so that personal websites could replicate a lot
| of what social networks did. DiSo is one that comes to mind [1].
|
| The fact was...people didn't care. It made building harder...not
| easier.
|
| I think it's inevitable. Over time, adoption trends towards easy
| UX, and open standards almost by their nature lag behind silos in
| their ability to optimize experience.
|
| [1] https://diso-project.org/
| guestbest wrote:
| Wordpress had a standard called FOAF for linking websites. FOAF
| - Friend Of A Friend (XML based). I don't know if it is used
| anymore
| themadryaner wrote:
| There's been a big push to develop modern standards in the
| IndieWeb community [0]. There are two important standards:
|
| - WebMention, a W3C standard that is basically the equivalent
| of @ing someone on Twitter [1]. It is simply an http request
| to a discoverable endpoint with two pieces of data: the
| webpage being mentioned, and the webpage mentioning it.
| WordPress had a similar standard called Pingback and websites
| supporting WebMention often support both for backwards
| compatibility. - microformats2, an ad-hoc standard for adding
| metadata to webpages, meant especially for providing metadata
| for web mentions [2]. For instance, you can specify that the
| mention is a "like", "reply", or "reblog", and set the author
| name and avatar.
|
| Independent websites that add support for this can then parse
| the WebMention to create a comment section and like counter
| and readers can follow the links to other blogs that talk
| about the blog post they just read. There are a decent number
| of personal sites that already support this, like those
| mentioned in [3]. With enough adapters, it might build the
| network effects necessary to become a viable social media
| alternative. Right now though, those in the network are
| predominantly tech oriented since there isn't a ton of third
| party support.
|
| [0]: https://indieweb.org/ [1]:
| https://www.w3.org/TR/webmention/ [2]:
| http://microformats.org/ [3]:
| https://indieweb.org/Webmention#IndieWeb_Examples
| EddieDante wrote:
| There's also IndieWeb, but I decided it wasn't my time because
| I wanted my own website, not a web application that pretended
| to be a website.
| NHQ wrote:
| The OG P2P network...
| btbuildem wrote:
| The problem of the "walled garden" also seems to be a solution to
| the "bot apocalypse" -- unless you put your site behind a paywall
| or a bot-proof login, it will be swarmed with automated traffic.
|
| It's unfortunate that the defences, the "hardening" of sites
| leads to silos, but within these silos the very same forces
| (attention mining, etc) are leveraged for profit.
|
| Beyond the wall the scavengers will eat you, within the walls
| you're put to work on a track.
| birdyrooster wrote:
| Remember website rings? Lol
| sbuttgereit wrote:
| "OG Social Network: Other People's Websites"... nope, not
| terribly OG really.
|
| For those on the early internet there were things like mailing
| lists, Usenet, and others which allowed communities to form
| online.
|
| For those not on the early internet there were still network
| supporting social interaction and had well developed communities.
| BBSs, FidoNet, and even consumer oriented online service
| providers such as CompuServe existed before the internet was
| widely available to average consumers and pre-dating the
| existence of websites by some years; such services were
| absolutely social with email, forums, and real-time group chat
| rooms. I developed many far flung friendships through many of
| these social networking services... and all well before 1990.
| roberttod wrote:
| A lot of comments here like "we tried this", "people didn't want
| this" and "that's not where things are going".
|
| As far as I see it, the timing is perfectly ripe right now for
| change. People are on the lookout for nutritional, good-for-you
| alternatives to the sugar diet of social media we're being
| served. It's not everyone, but no longer just tech enabled folks
| either. Just because we've been going in a bad direction, doesn't
| mean that's how it will always go.
|
| Maybe I'm being optimistic, but isn't that what's generally
| needed for positive change?
| [deleted]
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Yeah I think it's a serious trap to only look for mainstream
| appeal. The long tail has been severely neglected the last 10
| or so years, and I think this is an opportunity to be part in
| creating something new. Like who cares if it doesn't become the
| next Facebook. Maybe that's a good thing.
| roberttod wrote:
| Agree. It's always a safe prediction that the status quo is
| what the future looks like but thinking like that only serves
| to stifle innovation.
|
| I for one am very interested in alternatives, and here to
| support anyone helping to dig us out of where we've found
| ourselves.
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