[HN Gopher] Ooh.directory
___________________________________________________________________
Ooh.directory
Author : adrianhon
Score : 906 points
Date : 2022-11-23 15:04 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (ooh.directory)
(TXT) w3m dump (ooh.directory)
| boplicity wrote:
| The combination of good categorization and high-quality curation
| make this a very interesting project.
|
| Curation, combined with good categorization, is sorely needed in
| today's internet.
|
| The solution of "search" (aka Google) just doesn't cut it if you
| want to discover the best publications in a topic area.
|
| I hope this project takes off!
| prox wrote:
| Yeah me too!
|
| A nice addition would be having account, and being able to like
| it. Likes are not public, but instead combine to show you
| things other people liked as well. Since they are not public,
| hopefully that will discourage gaming it.
| snapcaster wrote:
| Site is down :(
| philgyford wrote:
| Looks OK from here. What are you seeing?
|
| (It's my site.)
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Firefox gives me this error:
|
| Secure Connection Failed
|
| An error occurred during a connection to ooh.directory.
| PR_END_OF_FILE_ERROR The page you are
| trying to view cannot be shown because the authenticity of
| the received data could not be verified. Please
| contact the web site owners to inform them of this problem.
| philgyford wrote:
| Thanks. Strange, not sure why. Lots of people are managing
| to see it fine, but there's obviously something not quite
| right somewhere...
| Farow wrote:
| Works fine for me on Firefox 107.
| snapcaster wrote:
| Just checked again, not working for me in chrome getting
|
| This site can't be reached
| n3storm wrote:
| No linux blogs
| pietroppeter wrote:
| More of this please!
| andrewstuart wrote:
| Should be called
|
| oohya.directory
| peter_l_downs wrote:
| This looks like a really cool project, excited to browse through
| over the holiday break. Just submitted my art blog
| (https://freezine.xyz), but realized I don't publish an RSS feed.
| Will have to address and resubmit.
| pjc50 wrote:
| .. https://freezine.xyz/1/high-bandwidth/index.html needs a
| strobe warning.
| InCityDreams wrote:
| >Best on a desktop browser.
|
| Why, oh why....? Stuck in hospital, so much free time free, so
| many restrictions, and yet so few - what am i missing, or
| likely to have missed, being on mobile?
| peter_l_downs wrote:
| Sorry to hear you're in hospital, I hope you get well soon.
| The warning is there because I don't design the site for
| mobile, plus there is content hidden around the site that is
| easiest to find by viewing source or otherwise exploring in a
| way that mobile browsers don't make easy.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| using on mobile browser (Safari); looking good so far
| CrypticShift wrote:
| Many of you surely remember Technorati. It was one of the first
| popular RSS blog aggregators. was it a directory too? I forgot.
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20080529000125/http://technorati...
|
| Nowadays, I find Feedly topics a good place to explore RSS
| sources. I believe it is human curation, so it is kind of a
| directory too (though less "indie" and not restricted to blogs).
| You can sort by Followers (=popularity) and articles/week.
| riffraff wrote:
| Yes it also worked as a directory.
|
| When I started blogging again some time ago my first question
| was what might be the modern equivalent, and I found none.
| cactacea wrote:
| Did someone just reinvent Yahoo as it existed in 1994?
| saboot wrote:
| I hope so, it was useful then, useful now!
| monkeynotes wrote:
| I don't think it's that simple. It was useful then because
| web discoverability was an unsolved problem, and web content
| was tiny compared to today. A directory sort of fit the need.
| As the web grew directories became bloated and hard to
| navigate, search became more useful.
|
| This is more of a nostalgia or niche link list. It's not the
| same purpose as yahoo in the 90s.
| blowski wrote:
| If you don't think it's useful for you, then don't use it.
| I like it, so I'm going to use it.
| orlp wrote:
| Web discoverability was solved and then unsolved once again
| by endless SEO.
| fnfontana wrote:
| I think that search engines like Google are unbeatable to
| find content that we already know about. On the other hand,
| those lists are great to discover what we don't already
| know about, such as new topics, etc. Just like the awesome
| lists on GitHub.
| luispauloml wrote:
| > Just like the awesome lists on GitHub.
|
| What are these lists you're talking about? Could you give
| an example?
| OctopusLupid wrote:
| One example: https://github.com/awesome-
| selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted
| ivan_ah wrote:
| Here is an awesome list of awesome lists on various
| topics: https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome#contents
| mattarm wrote:
| > Just like the awesome lists on GitHub.
|
| My thought exactly, and also why I don't just search
| 'latest news' on Google every morning. Human curation is
| a thing. (not sure how much human curation goes into
| ooh.directory, but I'm pretty sure they don't use
| Google's ranking algorithms to surface links)
| philgyford wrote:
| Hi, it's my site. I find the links by exploring*, and I
| add and categorise them manually.
|
| * or "surfing the net", if you're old enough.
| rjewell wrote:
| doing god's work
| pavlov wrote:
| It's not a coincidence: there's a shadow of an exclamation
| point in the logo, and the color scheme hints towards Yahoo!'s
| trademark purple too.
| aendruk wrote:
| And the name. Yah _ooh_
| ralmeida4381 wrote:
| LOL, that was my first impression! Obviously the milenials
| doesn't know about yahoo.
|
| But well... the problem is almost the same: too few info == too
| much info => No enough info to make decisions.
| Mezzie wrote:
| Hey now, a couple of us remember! ;)
|
| Yahoo is how baby me learned the word 'hierarchical'.
| cactacea wrote:
| Sorry to break it to you but I'm a millennial lol
| cercatrova wrote:
| Millennials? Or Gen Z?
|
| The youngest Millennial is 26, so they probably knew at least
| a little when they were young about what Yahoo was.
| [deleted]
| xtracto wrote:
| Reminds me of an old site I used to frequent in the late 1990s:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/19991129033212/http://www.wannal...
|
| Back then, it had a lot of very interesting info to learn about
| several subjects. I yearn for that internet.
| dutchbrit wrote:
| Looks like the site currently doesn't know how to serve PHP/you
| download their source code for the homepage when visiting.
| docmars wrote:
| "No blogs promoting hate speech, denial of climate change, anti-
| vax ideas, etc."
|
| Well that's a shame, there's quite a few out there that pose
| credible and interesting questions and discussions around some of
| these topics.
|
| Basically this is saying: "No conservative blogs allowed" which
| erases at least 50% or more of the population's musings.
|
| I'd love to see an aggregator that isn't politically motivated
| and biased as this one is. The internet would be a better, freer
| place.
|
| We may even find that these "hateful", "alarming" ideas are in
| fact mainstream after all and being unfairly suppressed by sites
| like these as well as legacy media, social media, etc. under the
| guise of the greater good.
| alimov wrote:
| > Basically this is saying: "No conservative blogs allowed"
| which erases at least 50% or more of the population's musings.
|
| Curious which population (country?) you are referring to that's
| 50% or more conservative
| docmars wrote:
| The United States, judging by voting numbers in the last 2
| Presidential elections. 50% is obviously a rough rounding,
| and serves as a figure of speech.
| ranger47 wrote:
| Spreading misinformation is a VERY different thing from
| constructive discussion of different takes on an issue. Anyone
| taking offense to a request like this can't tell the
| difference.
| docmars wrote:
| Valid discussions and critiques on the prescribed narratives
| are all labeled as "misinformation" conveniently and
| expressly because the holders of the legacy media narratives
| are in power and do not wish to be challenged. Common
| examples are: medical practitioners blowing the whistle on
| vaccine injuries, or recommending treatments to illnesses
| that have been demonized by media outlets.
|
| You would be shocked at how many things no longer exist, but
| previously existed with incredible support and numbers behind
| them. Everything from Facebook groups, YouTube videos, blog
| posts, websites, etc. -- too many mediums to list, and yet,
| unreferenceable here because they've been taken down by the
| liberal moderation machine who's unwilling to view their
| opponents as valid participants of grander dialogues, so
| instead, enact policies of erasure rather than honest debate.
|
| It is not a fair game when those who are in power _are_ the
| ones deciding what can and cannot exist in the public scene,
| causing them to remain unchallenged, and prevents their
| political opponents from obtaining power by suppressing their
| use of the standard avenues of communication.
| [deleted]
| axg11 wrote:
| I like the aesthetic -- a modern warm Craigslist?
| blowski wrote:
| How on earth do you use a website without full screen parallax
| stock photos?
| bradmcgo wrote:
| Definitely checking this out. I'd love to dive into some new
| blogs that offer in-depth, rich, original content.
| xeeeeeeeeeeenu wrote:
| It seems that blogs can only be assigned to a single category.
| What about sites that are dedicated to more than one topic?
|
| Nonetheless, this is a really cool project!
| philgyford wrote:
| As it says on the About page (https://ooh.directory/about/):
|
| > Some blogs appear in two or, occasionally, three categories.
| If it would take more than that, it ends up in the wonderland
| of Uncategorizable.
| xeeeeeeeeeeenu wrote:
| Thanks, I somehow missed that.
|
| Since there's no way to select multiple categories in the
| "suggest" form, I take it you will manually amend the entry.
| philgyford wrote:
| Definitely - but it's very useful to start off with a
| suggestion!
| cyrialize wrote:
| This reminds me of Neocities Districts!
| https://districts.neocities.org/
| marcin32 wrote:
| I am working on a retail directory: https://usashoplocator.com
| zadler wrote:
| Love to see this
| sirodoht wrote:
| That's pretty awesome! I maintain something similar:
| https://collection.mataroa.blog/
| rambambram wrote:
| Wow, big list! I bookmarked it.
|
| Ever considered to publish this list as an easily searchable
| and exportable OPML file?
| rchaud wrote:
| Time is a flat circle, eh?
|
| But all kidding aside, web directories should be much more
| powerful now than in the 90s. Websites have RSS, and directory
| websites should be able to automatically monitor things like
| uptime, and leverage RSS to preview a site's most recent post.
|
| I've considered maintaining my own directory on my personal
| website (a one-way webring if you will), but always stopped
| because the sites I linked to either died, or were acquired and
| became something very different.
| Minor49er wrote:
| Regarding the lifetime of a site, it might be possible to
| submit requests to the Internet Archive or similar service
| whenever a site is added to a directory or a new post is found
| on it. That way too, it would be easier to see when a site is
| no longer active or when it turned into something else. Then,
| when it's deactivated, the web directory could just point to
| the archive first
| nijave wrote:
| Well, we have awesome-* in GitHub now. Unfortunately RSS seems
| to still be hit-or-miss.
| Semaphor wrote:
| The issue is curation. Many awesome-* lists are just the
| kitchen sink, with no regard given to quality or stability.
| mypetocean wrote:
| Do you mind clarifying what you're referring to?
| mitchdoogle wrote:
| https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome
| r0fl wrote:
| Are there any scripts or wordpress plugins that can build out
| much better directories like you describe?
| mrtksn wrote:
| >Time is a flat circle, eh?
|
| I prefer Mark Twain's "History never repeats itself, but it
| does often rhyme."
|
| It's pretty obvious that we have come to a stagnant period of
| online content and there's a desire to move past the glamour of
| the Instagram and political fights on Twitter and optimised for
| ad revenue videos on Youtube but I don't think that the
| personal websites are coming back.
|
| Those were cool because only specific type of people were able
| to build websites, then the code free services for sharing
| content came along and everybody got online presence but
| because the medium is the message we are kind of getting tired
| of the message. There seems to be a search for a new medium.
| The time for the next verse feels around the corner but I don't
| think we have found it just yet!
| pvg wrote:
| _I prefer Mark Twain 's_
|
| That has its own history
|
| https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/01/12/history-rhymes/
| account42 wrote:
| It might just be observation bias but it seems to me that
| personal websites and blogs _are_ coming back at least for
| the kinds of people that might have had one in the old web.
| Perhaps the trend won 't wash over the whole web but having a
| subculture that is at least as large as the old web would be
| great, no?
| kachnuv_ocasek wrote:
| I prefer Slavoj Zizek's "first time as a tragedy, second as a
| farce".
| notlukesky wrote:
| That was Karl Marx:
|
| https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/karl_marx_382655
| taneq wrote:
| Maybe the first time. ;)
| grey-area wrote:
| In a fun essay named The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis
| Napoleon, though apparently lifted by Marx from a letter
| to him by Engels:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eighteenth_Brumaire_o
| f_L...
|
| So really it was Engels.
| pmontra wrote:
| "First time is not first, second time is an inaccurate
| citation." Could we settle on this?
| vanderZwan wrote:
| Isn't that more or less Stigler's Law of Eponymy?
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler%27s_law_of_eponymy
| isamuel wrote:
| That was someone else.
| mitchdoogle wrote:
| We have lots of curated lists popping up. Pretty soon someone
| will make a search engine to search all the lists.
| d_cyper wrote:
| Got any examples? Would be interesting to see what's out
| there...
| bckr wrote:
| A searchable list of lists, or SLL, you might say?
| nine_k wrote:
| Why, a curated list of curated lists, of course.
|
| I wonder how soon people will start to collaboratively train
| ML models for curation, by their acts if curation, much like
| spam filters are trained today.
| tiffanyh wrote:
| DMOZ
|
| Remind me of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMOZ
| WallyFunk wrote:
| Bookmarked. Will revisit.
|
| Anyone else notice everything old is new again? Neocities[0],
| Marginalia Search[1], Project Gemini[2], etc
|
| There's many others I'm forgetting, and new ones popup on
| Hackernews each week.
|
| Is this just basic nostalgia, people wanting to recreate the
| dial-up days or even BBS days?
|
| [0] https://neocities.org/
|
| [1] https://www.marginalia.nu/
|
| [2] https://gemini.circumlunar.space/
| partyguy wrote:
| You're right! Even MySpace is back [0]
|
| [0] https://spacehey.com/
| webscout wrote:
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| > Is this just basic nostalgia, people wanting to recreate the
| dial-up days or even BBS days?
|
| That's certainly not why I created my search engine. Old isn't
| an end, its a means to cut the bullshit.
|
| Like I read a lot of old books, not because I'm nostalgic for
| yellowed paper, but because they consistently have much better
| signal to noise ratio than most of what you'll find on a screen
| or printed past 1990 or so. (When people bought books in
| physical book stores and weren't primarily ordering books
| online, books weren't judged by their page count as a proxy for
| how much content they contained, and thus had a lot less filler
| and anecdotes.)
|
| If you gave me a method of selection that was as reliable for
| identifying good books among contemporary books, I'd probably
| read more contemporary books as a result.
| BirAdam wrote:
| I believe that much of it is, indeed, basic nostalgia. Some of
| this, however, is also the recognition that not all of the
| early web was bad. Much of the early internet is viewed through
| rose-tinted glasses, but some of it was really good. For
| example, the ability to use a directory to find _exactly_ what
| you're looking for while search just feeds you two pages of
| paid result listings. Likewise, gopher made information
| available on even the most modest of machines (gemini trying to
| recreate something somewhat better) while modern web can spin
| up cooling fans on high-end laptop from 2019.
| nibbleshifter wrote:
| I recently procured the highest specced out XPS 15 Dell
| offers, and some modern websites manage to spin the fans to
| an insane degree.
| laputan_machine wrote:
| Very cool
| robga wrote:
| It reminds me of DMOZ ODP days.
|
| Ohh.nostalgia
|
| http://www.odp.org/homepage.php (archive)
| zozbot234 wrote:
| DMOZ was and is freely licensed though. This one makes for a
| nice proof of concept, but there's no mention of availability
| or reusability for any of this data.
| robga wrote:
| DMOZ had an interesting license, as I recall
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Directory_License
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20070813215202/http://www.dmoz.o.
| ..
|
| "The Free Software Foundation describes the ODL as a non-free
| license"
|
| But your point is a good one and well taken.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| It was relicensed as CC-BY in 2011, however. AIUI, the ODL
| even predates CC.
| Minor49er wrote:
| You'll love Curlie which was created by a number of DMOZ alumni
|
| https://curlie.org/
| jordanmorgan10 wrote:
| Funny enough, I searched for "iOS" and my blog was the only
| result haha. Not sure how, or if someone else submitted it.
|
| As an aside, I wish JSON feed would've taken off :-/ I know, I
| know, another standard - but it _was_ a better one I think.
| aliqot wrote:
| nice :) Now make it a webring with a snippet
| AndrewStephens wrote:
| More of this kind of thing, please. Any boost privately run blogs
| get is a welcome respite from the walled gardens of most social
| media.
|
| I am just sad that my very unfocused blog doesn't really fit into
| any of their categories.
| philgyford wrote:
| There's always "Personal blogs", which is a large number of
| them.
| AndrewStephens wrote:
| I guess I do fit in somewhere, thanks.
| rambambram wrote:
| I like how you say on your site that you recently joined
| Mastodon, while your RSS feed works just fine and I see posts
| from 2006. ;)
| bsnnkv wrote:
| This gave me a flashback to the final season of "Halt and Catch
| Fire", which I enjoyed a lot and recommend to anyone who has
| nostalgic feelings about computing and the internet in the 90s.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Bob Loblaws Law Blog. Just throwing that out there.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Looks like an early version of Yahoo!
| toyg wrote:
| "No blogs were found matching motorbikes."
|
| Sadface.jpg
| perlpimp wrote:
| it would be helpful if there was some sort of rss aggregator
| functionality. Ie google reader that used to be.
| piperswe wrote:
| I've been working on something sorta similar, just focused on
| general websites rather than just blogs: https://webjamboree.net/
| rambambram wrote:
| Nice! Bookmarked it.
|
| I also recently started making some portal with curated links
| and feeds. I call it Discovery Portals. The very small
| beginning can be found at https://www.heyhomepage.com/discover/
| LoganDark wrote:
| Instinctively typed "furry" into the search bar and got no
| results. High quality!
| mellosouls wrote:
| Current curation rules:
|
| https://ooh.directory/about/
|
| - Every blog must have an RSS or Atom feed.
|
| - Newsletters aren't included. Some sites are a blog and a
| newsletter, with identical content, but only those which mainly
| seem like a blog are included.
|
| - Only blogs updated within the past year or so are added.
|
| - Tumblrs are only included if they're either focused on a
| specific topic or feature original content.
|
| - Link blogs are only included if they include original
| commentary about each link.
|
| - No blogs promoting hate speech, denial of climate change, anti-
| vax ideas, etc.
| RobertRoberts wrote:
| > - No blogs promoting hate speech, denial of climate change,
| anti-vax ideas, etc.
|
| I've heard of Twitter accounts getting banned because they
| mentioned some of these subjects in context of criticizing
| them. (which is the opposite result that would be expected)
|
| How their curation process work is just as important as the
| rules themselves. If it's transparent and there's a person (not
| just an automated algorithm), is there also a recourse process
| for false positives or bad decision making?
| rideontime wrote:
| I'm pretty sure Phil is the curator.
| RobertRoberts wrote:
| What is the "process" for resolving conflicts with Phil?
|
| (the key part of my concern)
| manicennui wrote:
| Don't use the site?
| alexchamberlain wrote:
| Email him and say "Hi Phil"?
| RobertRoberts wrote:
| My personal opinion is that Phil is a busy guy and
| doesn't have time to carefully analyze your request with
| any nuance.
|
| Here's an example of the difficulty.
|
| "Phil, can you review the article [link to blog] where
| you banned us from? We are critically analyzing a very
| socially sensitive topic and while we are disagreeing
| with the majority of people, we actually encouraging
| unity and are not encouraging any hate. You can clearly
| see if you read our entire article."
|
| Or, "I only linked to Trump's tirade to point out how
| insane it is. Can you re-read my article....?"
| rchaud wrote:
| Sounds like you might be better off acquiring an audience
| via newsletter.
| RobertRoberts wrote:
| > I've heard of Twitter accounts getting banned because
| they mentioned some of these subjects in context of
| criticizing them. (which is the opposite result that
| would be expected)
|
| My comment above is the very reason for this discussion.
| Not using the site is the same as suggesting not
| commenting here, which is nearly nonsensical.
| slater wrote:
| > No blogs promoting hate speech, denial of climate change,
| anti-vax ideas, etc.
|
| Can we have this for the entire Internet, please? Thanks.
| [deleted]
| quriosity wrote:
| Tade0 wrote:
| I have to say I enjoy the consistent sub 800ms load times.
| felipelalli wrote:
| I miss directories. The hard part is to keep it up to date and
| delete unreachable sites. Also flag the inactive ones. I don't
| know if this site does this.
| msephton wrote:
| It has most recent post from each blog. Maybe blogs will be
| hidden/deleted when that gets longer than a year or so?
| philgyford wrote:
| At the moment I've only added blogs that have been updated
| within the past year or so. But over time some blogs will
| obviously stop updating.
|
| It's currently possible to filter each category to only show
| blogs that have been updated within the past week/month/year,
| which should help.
|
| If it gets to the point where there are _lots_ of blogs that
| are still live, but haven 't been updated for a long time,
| maybe I'll make the default to only show blogs that have been
| updated within a year or so. We'll see.
|
| I can see which blogs generate errors of different kinds when
| fetching their feeds, so I'll be able to spot blogs that
| disappear. If that happens they'll be removed/hidden from the
| site.
| b1nj0y wrote:
| I'd like to recommend TabHub: https://tabhub.github.io, you can
| read rss in new tab.
|
| Also there're tools that helps you to create rss feed for sites
| which have no rss feed: https://github.com/tabhub/rssify
| davedx wrote:
| Not OP's first rodeo. I was exploring his website and found on
| archive.org his first web directory, from 1998!
| https://web.archive.org/web/19980628182433/http://www.gyford...
| colinprince wrote:
| see also Today's Guardian:
|
| https://guardian.gyford.com/
| msephton wrote:
| This is more of a link list, rather than RSS directory. But
| cool find!
| adrianhon wrote:
| More context in this announcement post!
|
| https://mastodon.social/@philgyford/109393682988861819
| s3000 wrote:
| This is the best thing for RSS in a long time. What I miss though
| for RSS streams is commenting. 'Nobody' reads the articles on
| link aggregators, (*e: just the comments). In a way, RSS is a
| link aggregator that limits its user base to the ones who read
| and don't comment.
|
| I am wondering what will happen if RSS readers find a way to
| share comments on posts. Maybe ActivityPub makes that possible.
|
| The only service of which I am aware that allows for comments on
| RSS is https://linklonk.com/ . Are there other approaches to
| bring comments to RSS streams?
|
| Maybe ooh.directory can use ActivityPub to allow commenting and
| voting on the entries. Comments on HN are great to check for
| problems with an article. That should also be true for comments
| about entire blogs.
| rambambram wrote:
| > What I miss though for RSS streams is commenting.
|
| >In a way, RSS is a link aggregator that limits its user base
| to the ones who read and don't comment.
|
| I share this view. What do you think about a concept wherein a
| collection of followed feeds is presented in a timeline with
| the possibility to 'comment' with an email form? It will look
| like a regular comment textarea under some blogpost, but the
| commenting is done by email. The reaction isn't immediately
| visible under the blogpost (if at all) and therefor everything
| works humanly slow. But there's also no signup required, so
| it's more anonymous and openly accessible.
| s3000 wrote:
| >a collection of followed feeds is presented in a timeline
| with the possibility to 'comment'
|
| From my point of view, that's the future.
|
| Using mail is dangerous because it is another protocol, and
| it still requires account management because nobody will post
| to arbitrary pages with their primary mail address. That
| said, mail still has the potential to become the standard for
| social networks.
|
| Why should comments not be immediately visible? People can
| already write mails to authors. That's not what builds
| momentum. The interesting part is the interaction of the
| audience.
|
| We can build social interaction that improves direct human
| interaction in the same way that cars improve human movement.
| I wouldn't focus on slowing it down but on speeding up the
| filtering so that it is easy to find the individually
| preferred audience among all possible reactions to an url.
| The difficult part is to maintain group identities and
| momentum when all comments are dissected and re-aggregated.
|
| It's problematic to manage comments on the server of a blog
| post. This creates silos and echo chambers because it is
| difficult to find the comments of a user on other blogs and
| creators rarely allow their audience to create their own
| posts. Newspapers with their comment sections already offer
| that protocol. We have Facebook because newspapers missed out
| on coming together and offering the missing parts.
|
| What is missing at Linklonk, apart from opening up to
| ActivityPub, is long-term conversations on posts. On
| aggregators like HN, there is an audience at the top
| comments. Hardly anybody writes comments on old posts. To
| make comments on off-momentum articles worthwhile, it would
| be necessary to have a notification function that is
| triggered not only by replies but also by new comments when
| they pass a threshold.
| rambambram wrote:
| Thanks for your reply.
|
| > Why should comments not be immediately visible? People
| can already write mails to authors. That's not what builds
| momentum. The interesting part is the interaction of the
| audience.
|
| I agree, but I was thinking of some filtering function
| wherein the webmaster can whitelist/blacklist comments. If
| a certain site or topic attracts - for whatever reason -
| visitors who abuse the comments, the webmaster needs to be
| able to block stuff afterwards or even upfront. An ideal
| life would be wherein every visitor/commenter does only
| nice things.
|
| > Hardly anybody writes comments on old posts.
|
| Interesting idea. I always like it when I get responses on
| my videos/comments on Youtube from years ago.
| msephton wrote:
| I at the end of each of my blog posts I include a link to the
| tweet where I announced the post. Works well for me. If Twitter
| dies I guess I'll have to swap them out at some point.
|
| Alternatively, you could use something like a Discus embed for
| comments but I didn't want to have one more thing to manage.
| mawise wrote:
| > I am wondering what will happen if RSS readers find a way to
| share comments on posts
|
| The IndieWeb community is focused on this with Social
| Readers[1] and Webmentions[2]. The core idea is your reader
| also ties into your own published feed, so you can make a
| comment right in your reader that publishes the comment to your
| own feed and sends a webmention to the original article so they
| know about it.
|
| Barriers to entry are still kinda high (much like making a
| website 25 years ago) so any adoption should lead to a better
| signal/noise ratio. Unless it becomes popular enough for bots
| to start spamming the webmentions...
|
| [1]: https://indieweb.org/social_reader
|
| [2]: https://indieweb.org/Webmention
| account42 wrote:
| Webmention depends on the original source to link back to
| those comments for discovery though, right? I think perhaps a
| better approach would be a way to comment on any URL and see
| comments from other users (or communities) that you have
| subscribed to. That way the author of the content being
| discussed is not in a position to limit the discussion to
| what they approve of and you can discuss things that are not
| even opted into this system.
|
| Ideally this system would also be integrated into browsers
| you you can see and write comments even when visiting a URL
| directly.
| [deleted]
| kepano wrote:
| I love to see this. The death of blogs and RSS is highly
| exaggerated. The idea that Google "killed" blogs by killing
| Google Reader is a meme that is more destructive than Google's
| act in itself.
|
| There are countless healthy and active blogs that you can read
| via RSS. There are great RSS reader apps.
|
| For us technically-minded folks we need to keep being proactive
| about helping people read the web via RSS, improving discovery,
| and continually making RSS a first-class option on sites we
| build.
| moffkalast wrote:
| rchaud wrote:
| Why did people create podcasts for free and distribute them
| via RSS? Because there once was a time when advances in
| computing had use cases that weren't driven entirely by
| commercial interests.
| moffkalast wrote:
| If only we still lived in that reality.
| nine_k wrote:
| We still do! But the percentage of such publishers is
| smaller than back then, maybe against the desires if
| would-be publishers. Do you think it was easy to offer
| paid online content and get paid in 1998?
| account42 wrote:
| You can always choose to. Not everyone will join you of
| course and you might be discouraged because of that but
| there are plenty of us putting websites and content
| online without commercial interests.
| janalsncm wrote:
| On my blog I get about 800 hits per month. It's not enough to
| generate meaningful revenue with ads. So my blog is more
| about branding and SEO for my name, and slapping an ad or
| even a donate button feels cheap to me.
|
| If I had 10x the visitors I might see things differently but
| I think a lot of small blogs are in my boat.
| Kye wrote:
| The troubling assumption here is that every site has or
| depends on ads and cares about rankings.
|
| >> _" Why would anyone implement it?"_
|
| Because your assumption is wrong.
| executesorder66 wrote:
| They wouldn't, but who cares about them? RSS is for people
| who blog to share their interests freely, and to help their
| readers get the content more easily.
| manicennui wrote:
| Not everyone is trying to monetize everything.
| nibbleshifter wrote:
| Absolute heresy to say that on here lol.
| account42 wrote:
| Actually not really. Depends on the post of course, but
| for a VC ad channel, HN has plenty of users that are very
| much not aligned with that mindset and more let's say
| idealistic comments will regularly get upvoted here.
| rambambram wrote:
| I would say that providing a first paragraph of text by RSS
| feed might actually attract more users/readers to a site to
| read the full article (paid or not).
|
| Wasn't it Basecamp/37Signals who said to emulate drugs
| dealers and give the first try away for free? ;)
| nibbleshifter wrote:
| I've never met a single drug dealer who actually gave any
| drugs away for free.
| riffraff wrote:
| I recall as a kid teachers giving us these lectures about
| not accepting drug-containing removable tattoos from
| strangers.
|
| I wonder where this meme came from.
| account42 wrote:
| Drug education has always been all kinds of divorced from
| reality. But once you step away from literal drugs then
| the concept of a freebie to hook you is not at all
| uncommon.
| susam wrote:
| I have been maintaining a personal website since 2001 and the
| core interest of my website is to share things I find
| interesting. RSS does not go against that. On the other hand,
| RSS makes it easy for subscribers to find out when I have
| shared something new.
| lgas wrote:
| Different people have different goals.
| onetrickwolf wrote:
| I think people seem them as dead because a small percentage of
| internet users engage with them, but people forget that
| billions more people have access to the internet now. Even
| though it's a smaller percentage, the actual number of users
| has still gone up generally in my experience.
| wpietri wrote:
| It sure didn't help, but I agree that Google Reader's death
| didn't kill blogs themselves; the decline has been pretty
| steady (Reader was killed in 2013):
| https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=r...
|
| I also agree that RSS is still worth it. I am a happy
| subscriber to Newsblur: https://newsblur.com/
|
| Indeed, the mess that is Twitter is giving me hope that we'll
| see a comeback of people self-hosting their content.
| stanislavb wrote:
| A shameless plug - I've built (recently) a simple yet powerful
| blog reader that could satisfy the needs of most people
| https://lenns.io. Why - it solves three primary issues with
| "traditional" readers:
|
| 1) You can follow websites (based on blog-post titles) when
| there isn't a proper RSS feed.
|
| 2) You have control on how many results per feed to have listed
| (e.g. not having your whole feed overloaded with the posts of
| one source)
|
| 3) You can assign priorities to Sources and categories so that
| you have control what's on top of your feed.
|
| ... if someone here bothers to give it a try, I'd be happy to
| receive any feedback.
|
| p.s. there's a full OPML import/export support.
| leokennis wrote:
| This sounds interesting to me. Not because RSS is broken, I
| hardly ever encounter a site without a feed. But the "only
| one best article per site per day" sounds very smart.
|
| However...do I get this by e-mail? In an app? Web interface?
| Maybe you could add some screenshots to your page :-)
| Semaphor wrote:
| > As most blogs and websites don't export the full content of
| their posts, that leads to a mixed reading experience. Quite
| often, you click the title of a post within a conventional
| reader only to see that there's nothing there apart from
| another link to the original post.
|
| It's the opposite for me. Almost every blog exports the full
| text. It used to be the other way, but that was in the
| GReader times.
|
| > The feed reader for people that want to be in control
|
| I find that a questionable headline with no self-hosting
| option.
|
| And it misses screenshots, I never sign up blind for
| anything.
| marban wrote:
| https://biztoc.com for instance.
| asicsp wrote:
| Reminds me of https://blogsurf.io/ which used to have a way to
| list recent blog posts (but couldn't find a way to do so now).
|
| This one has categories and filtering options, nice! Random is
| good to have (see also
| https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/random)
| the-printer wrote:
| This is cool, shout out to all the directories and lists and
| aggregators.
| yrds96 wrote:
| This is the idea that I always had but never implemented. I'm
| glad my dream came true.
| [deleted]
| afarrell wrote:
| This design is really pleasing to my eye.
| unglaublich wrote:
| Humans aggregating what they think is useful for other humans.
| That is the internet of the past, and hopefully of the future.
| rambambram wrote:
| I can't agree more. It's the only way to stand up to the fakery
| and artificiality of algorithms. I try to make my software
| 'internet friendly'.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Looks very nice. Unfortunately a lot of good bloggers now use
| paywalled substack (I don't blame them, I don't have time to
| write for free either), but this is a good resource for the few
| that are still gratis.
| sneak wrote:
| I was thinking of starting a web directory similar to this! I'm
| glad to see it.
|
| Is there an OPML file that lists all of the blogs it knows about?
| philgyford wrote:
| I will be adding various OPML files at some point.
| rambambram wrote:
| Smart request! I recently started collecting blogs on
| https://www.heyhomepage.com/discover/ (almost nothing to see
| there right now) and I planned to publish the lists of links
| also as easily searchable and sharable OPML files.
| komali2 wrote:
| Fun and utterly off topic: I'm on a boat for my partner's
| birthday, and this "FortiGuard" web security thing they use on
| their satellite internet that yesterday temporarily prevented us
| from watching porn together is today preventing me from viewing
| this cool site, on the grounds: "Newly Observed Domain."
|
| Wondering who thought new domains should be blocked "just in
| case" and how they determine that. What percentage of requests
| the service receives are domains its never seen before? Assuming
| 90% or so are like, google, facebook, etc, but what if someone
| has a phone app that calls weird api domains? Actually that might
| explain some of the random weird failures I've been seeing on
| this trip...
| [deleted]
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