[HN Gopher] The Small Website Discoverability Crisis (2021)
___________________________________________________________________
The Small Website Discoverability Crisis (2021)
Author : ggpsv
Score : 454 points
Date : 2023-11-15 14:31 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.marginalia.nu)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.marginalia.nu)
| frankfrank13 wrote:
| Something something dead internet theory.
|
| But also yes, I can't believe how many great, small blogs and
| other useful websites I've found only from HN
| dannyobrien wrote:
| Is the claim (that there are interesting small websites that are
| impossible to find on the major search engines) true? I mean, it
| feels true, but how would we measure this? How would be detect
| whether things had got worse, or was getting better?
|
| As I say, I am sympathetic, but I would like to have more
| confidence in the claim, and better ways to test proposed
| solutions.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Someone ought to build a search engine to try to demonstrate
| this fact.
| sowbug wrote:
| Duplicate Google, but put a minus sign in front of the
| ranking formula.
| vasco wrote:
| I tend to think these articles which have become common come from
| a good place but say more about someone's internet habits than
| about the internet. I find most social media have a profile
| section for "personal website". I find many such personal
| websites by following people's github profiles from interesting
| repositories or PRs. Sometimes they link to other websites. I do
| the same in HN, snoop around to see if an interesting comment has
| a link to a website in the profile. Many articles are posted on
| HN from personal websites, which again usually link to other
| websites. I don't know I feel like, if I wanted I could spend all
| day doing this and would have no problem finding more than hours
| in the day. So are we complaining about the internet or that we
| got stuck in the walled gardens of youtube and tik tok and so on
| and kind of wish we would spend more time on the "old school
| internet" but don't because the other part is so addictive?
| piva00 wrote:
| In my point of view what's lacking is more places where
| curators that have found interesting small sites can showcase
| them.
|
| I used Digg a lot for that, StumbleUpon was also really nice
| for this type of discovery, then early Reddit had a similar
| effect.
|
| Nowadays? I don't know where to go, I can do all this effort of
| clicking around to find them but honestly I don't have the
| time, I'm in my mid-30s, I won't be jumping around hyperlinks
| searching for breadcrumbs of potential good content... A lot of
| people are doing that work already, like you, we are lacking a
| good place where we can pool this curation work collectively so
| others can discover it.
| marban wrote:
| For general news: https://upstract.com or https://biztoc.com
| TehShrike wrote:
| StumbleUpon was the best, I haven't had a better experience
| with finding interesting, relevant things on the internet.
|
| Though I did find https://cloudhiker.net/ recently, which is
| aiming for the same thing, and I'm optimistic.
| Liquix wrote:
| Just like you said - being surrounded by interesting people on
| interesting platforms who are likely to create small websites,
| we _occasionally_ stumble across a link in a walled garden
| profile.
|
| For the average internet user, small websites don't exist. Very
| few Instagram and TikTok profiles feature links to handcrafted
| sites. Google increasingly funnels all queries to the same 500
| giant SEO'd sites.
| janalsncm wrote:
| I guess the question is whether that matters. The average
| internet user today looks a lot different from the average
| internet user 20 or 30 years ago. The internet looked
| different but the demographics looked different as well. The
| average internet user primarily uses Instagram, Facebook,
| YouTube and TikTok because _that is the internet they enjoy_.
| confd wrote:
| "Small web" advocates may eschew the ethics of larger
| platforms, but they appear to desire the same positive feedback
| loops that make the larger platforms addicting.
|
| I think that a problem for some people is that the
| straightforward solutions to discoverability, such as simply
| browsing the web in the manner you described or even what is
| given in the marginalia.nu article, do not solve the desire to
| be _seen_ as urgently as more technologically coordinated
| processes.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| I have more Matrix and Discord rooms/"servers" than I can read
| in a day. If I catch up to the chatter in my Matrix anime rooms
| and my Discord RPG servers I'm not going to get any work done,
| any work done on the RPG I'm running, or any chores done at
| home. This is nothing to say about the personal blogs I read,
| the substacks, and Reddit, HN, etc. People are starving for
| personal content? As you say, I think this is more a user
| problem.
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| Kagi has an option to search what they term "the small web" [1].
| I haven't used it a lot - but the times I did, it seemed to give
| me good results.
|
| [1] https://blog.kagi.com/small-web
| sodimel wrote:
| A proposal, dear reader: Create a list of bookmarks linking to
| websites you find interesting, and publish it for the world to
| see. You decide what constitutes "interesting".
|
| That's exactly what I did with share-links : It's a tool that
| allow you to easily store and share links of things you like on
| the web.
|
| Here's the repo where you can find more info (see the file
| DEPLOY.md if you want to launch an instance on the web):
| https://gitlab.com/sodimel/share-links
|
| And here's my own instance, whith over... 4000 links:
| https://links.l3m.in/
|
| Want to be surprised? Open this link on a new tab:
| https://links.l3m.in/en/random/
| rambambram wrote:
| Nice, I subscribed to your feed for new links and tags.
| sodimel wrote:
| Thanks! It means a lot to know that some people care about my
| projects or the curated links I choose to save and share :)
| xaellison wrote:
| Whatever happened to stumbleupon? I feel like that was a popular
| website that served this purpose.
| dartos wrote:
| I miss stumbleupon.
|
| It was a tool for an exciting experimental internet.
|
| Nowadays I can only imagine it'd be flooded with odd numbered
| list articles.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| I built https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/random and
| https://explore.marginalia.nu to try to capture the old
| stumbleupon vibe.
|
| It's manually curated though so not the most scalable thing
| I've put together. Wish I had more time to expand on this,
| seems on the cusp of being pretty cool.
| mario_kart_snes wrote:
| How do I submit a link for this?
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| I haven't built a clean workflow for that yet, but in the
| interim, make a pull request here:
|
| https://github.com/MarginaliaSearch/PublicData/blob/master/
| s...
|
| and I'll poke it into the DB.
|
| If you don't want to dirty your hands with github, you can
| send me an email at kontakt@marginalia.nu :-)
| ss64 wrote:
| stumbleupon was reliant on putting websites into a frame with
| their menu at the top, once websites started blocking the
| framing of their content, for various security reasons, the
| idea was dead.
| ploum wrote:
| Not so long ago, every blog has a "blog roll", a list of author's
| favorite blogs.
|
| Nothing was better than have your blog in the blogroll of a
| "famous" blogger.
|
| It is funny how people who didn't live through this blog era are
| now reinventing it spontaneously. It's a bit like bloggers were
| onto something 20 years ago, before being killed by the
| advertisements monopolies.
|
| But there's a big difference between old blogosphere and current
| blogosphere : old blogs had ads. Most bloggers were experimenting
| with it, one way or another. We were lured by monetization and
| killed ourselves in the process.
|
| Younger bloggers seem to have learn about it: let's do the same
| old blogs but, this time, without any ads and by actively
| preventing tracking.
|
| That's how evolution works, when you think about it. It's
| beautiful.
| Finnucane wrote:
| Blogrolls could be either very freeform, or very topical,
| depending on the blog and the blog author, but they did the job
| --if you liked that blog, chances were pretty good you'd find
| something interesting in the blogroll.
| prmoustache wrote:
| Before the blogs, many websites had a links section as well.
|
| + the webrings.
| 101008 wrote:
| Webrings and some called them "Affiliates" (I dont know where
| the name came from, it makes more sense in Spanish, not sure
| in English), but they had this 82x32 buttons on the sidebar
| (sometimes anitmated GIFs) to similar websites, usually
| websites handled by friends.
|
| Oh, internet was so muuch better.
| StableAlkyne wrote:
| Links sections were awesome, and made the web feel deeper
| than it really was. You could go on dives just clicking
| through and finding so much cool stuff. Plus if it was a
| hobby site, there was inherently some level of curation - I
| don't think anybody would be linking to any of the hundreds
| of lookalike SEO "blogs" nowadays if it weren't for search
| engines allowing themselves to be gamed.
|
| Nowadays if it's not on the first "page" of Google (well,
| whatever the first group of infinite scrolling results is
| called) it might as well not exist. Makes the web feel
| flatter and less like a, well, web.
| never_inline wrote:
| I planned to do something similar to it on my blog. The idea
| being using that page as a public bookmark list. It would
| contain anything from books to blog posts to youtube videos.
|
| https://mahesh-hegde.github.io/readings/
|
| But I am not a prolific blogger and haven't updated it anyway
| for a long time.
| piperswe wrote:
| I do still see "ads" on these sorts of blogs, but not at all
| the same type of ad as elsewhere. There are a few "ad networks"
| that are just free promotion for various other web revival
| sites, e.g. https://wsmz.gay/#misc-bannerlink
|
| I quite love it, especially when it fits with the site's
| aesthetic.
| dzink wrote:
| There used to be directories that indexed those, but the flow of
| spam became insufferable and the money dwindled. Social media
| with its free content and auctioned advertising took over. The
| problem with current algorithms is the fact that they favor
| currency - if you are a Youtube creator and you don't churn
| content at a consistent rate, you get less exposure than the new
| stuff - creating a punishment for old but gold content.
| gumby wrote:
| > Blogs limp along through RSS and Atom, but relying on feeds
| shapes everything you write into a blog entry. It's stifling,
| homogenizing. The blogosphere, what remains of it, is incredibly
| samey.
|
| I don't see this at all: my feeds contain so-called "long form"
| post and sometimes single-line comments.
|
| AFAICT Gemini is essentially "add non-HTML files to your feed
| experience". Umm...OK? Certainly this blog post didn't suggest
| more, and to me wasn't particularly convincing given that I don't
| even experience (IMHO) the "problem" the author decried.
|
| Discovery is and will ever be a problem, but comments on sites
| like HN expose interesting things all the time.
| 303uru wrote:
| I agree, why does it matter if my feed is interspersed with
| everything from long form to a simple short form link post?
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| What I mean is your website turns into a list. Posts have a
| definite date, a title, a body, semantics such as a previous
| and next; before and after.
| hattmall wrote:
| Sounds a lot like what used to be one of my favorite site
|
| del.icio.us
|
| Which I believe Yahoo bought off and killed.
| ghaff wrote:
| I use pinboard.in. Works fine for me.
|
| But saving tags--what was called folksonomies at one point--
| never really became a mainstream way of sharing links as
| opposed to just bookmarking them for your own use.
|
| At the end of the day, a lot of this is lamenting that a hand-
| curated Internet doesn't scale.
| Lutzb wrote:
| I miss delicious. The amount of discoverable content that was
| staggering. Collaborative bookmarking needs to make a comeback.
| flir wrote:
| Is this reinventing Google's original "links are votes of
| confidence" observation? Nothing wrong with that of course.
|
| > on gemini-scale it works pretty well
|
| This might be the problem in a nutshell. Maybe discoverability
| doesn't scale, and (overlapping) villages are the only solution.
| elliotbnvl wrote:
| ChatGPT is really, really good at surfacing small blogs and
| websites on a huge variety of topics. Ask it for a list of
| personal blogs about running a hobby garden.
|
| It's not a perfect solution - if you ask for a fairly
| commercialized topic it can struggle to cut through the noise and
| will return larger websites with SEO-fodder style blog posts, but
| even with that caveat, it's miles better than Google.
| hospitalJail wrote:
| Eh, I still ran into SEO spam as the top results, even turning
| web off.
|
| I find this one of the worst parts of ChatGPT. Recommendations
| are full of advertisements/astroturfing/marketing. If you know
| any industry with aggressive marketers(For me, its Video games
| and seeing Nintendo/Stardew Vally populate those lists. Or
| iceland as a top vacation destination. Or recommending Apple
| products.)
|
| Honestly sucks really hard. Nothing you can do because the AI
| is dumb and can't figure out marketing makes words appear more
| often.
| gyinshen wrote:
| ChatGPT also hallucinates a lot. Many links generated by it
| don't work
| fsflover wrote:
| Here is how you find such websites: https://wiby.me
| RunSet wrote:
| But how are people expected to find _that_ website?
| mcpar-land wrote:
| A comment on Hacker News, of course
| andai wrote:
| True, we need a small website search engine search engine.
|
| In all seriousness though I have forgotten the name of this
| site at least 5 times, and have to look it up every time (and
| sometimes it is hard to find)... perhaps a rebranding is in
| order.
| Kovah wrote:
| Indeed, it's hard to discover small websites. While building
| https://Cloudhiker.net (like Stumbleupon but modern), I collected
| a few hundred of those websites and people love them!
|
| Also, clicking trough web rings (yeah they still exist), you
| discover a bunch of cool sites from strangers all around the
| world. I joined Indie Webring (https://xn--sr8hvo.ws/) and
| Fediring (https://fediring.net/) a while ago.
|
| Edit: oh almost forgot. I have a few hundred links in my personal
| bookmark archive at https://bookmarks.kovah.de
| joenot443 wrote:
| StumbleUpon was free, your product is $2.99/mo.
|
| What about that is more modern?
| spzb wrote:
| > StumbleUpon was free, your product is $2.99/mo.
|
| What could be more modern than that?
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| To be fair StumbleUpon seemingly also bled money until it
| shut down. Unclear if a subscription fee is _the_ answer, but
| it 's at least _an_ answer.
| Kovah wrote:
| The subscription is entirely optional and not required to use
| Cloudhiker. It's directed towards power users. It helps the
| website to stay up and running. I would say this approach is
| more modern than shovelling tons of ads onto users like it
| was done by Stumbleupon.
| waveBidder wrote:
| not powered by venture capital that plans to enshittify
| sounds like a good sign for longevity.
| Multicomp wrote:
| I'd be willing to do something like this. I'm too lazy to
| implement it (hence why we don't already have something like
| this) but I would enjoy something like the following workflow:
|
| 1. my firefox browser has an extension
|
| 2. if I think a website is interesting, I bookmark it to one of N
| bookmark lists (which can be arbitrarily categorized, whether
| topical like "tech rants" or Google+ style "IRL friends only")
|
| 3. the browser extension does some API calls to flush/fill each
| bookmark list to one or more of publicly accessible websites like
| my github bio, my HN profile, my blog listicles for one or more
| federated bookmarks, publishes an RSS entry, whatever
|
| This approach does not require an account (except that I give the
| browser extension credentials/tokens to wherever it publishes),
| and it results in one-click blogroll sharing.
|
| PS: the problem with this is the temptation for feature bloat.
|
| Feature 2: on known websites with user profiles like HN, reddit,
| github, check the user profile for all users on the page and list
| out discovered shared blogrolls by username
|
| Feature 3: reports such as 'most shared blogroll links' based on
| your own personal browsing history, calculated offline in your
| browser
|
| Feature 4: ability to block blogroll links with a comment as to
| why you do so
|
| Feature 5: ability to share your blocks with a given blogroll
| list
|
| Feature 6: ability to follow shared blogroll link blocks from
| other blogroll lists, then editorialize that shared list yourself
|
| Feature 7: ability to share your editorialized block list with
| others who trust you more than whoever you are editorializing
|
| ...and so on.
|
| Though I'm pretty sure I'm reinventing lots of lost features from
| the web of trust and semantic web era.
| dspillett wrote:
| A linked bookmark blog is essentially how many use Pinterest.
| Discoverability in part comes from shared lists because the
| related items on a given page are1 based on what other things
| are included in lists containing the item currently being
| viewed.
|
| Pinterest has a very strong visual bias, and often a selling-
| things bias with the stored links being to things you can buy,
| so there might be a niche for something like that with features
| geared around links more generally, or features specifically to
| help editorialising links to nows and other reading matter,
| though preferably without deliberately poisoning search results
| to over-favour the link storing site like Pinterest does.
|
| ----
|
| [1] at least in part, there may be other factors like what-you-
| have-looked-at-before, advertising, etc.
| brucethemoose2 wrote:
| > It's a bit strange, almost nobody seems to be doing this.
| Looking through a sample of personal websites, very few of them
| has links to other personal websites.
|
| Bingo. This isn't just the blogosphere, I see it in research
| papers, on GitHub pages, on social media, and elsewhere.
|
| I could speculate, but I don't _really_ know what causes this...
| arromatic wrote:
| I previously asked about about bringing back webrings to
| discover small sites but didn't gain much traction. there was
| only one comment linking about webring . I am curious too why
| there isn't a strong open source initiative like so many other
| open source projects.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38177128
| booleandilemma wrote:
| I'm sure it has something to do with crab mentality. Why
| promote others? The only people I see doing so are the already
| super successful.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality
| giantrobot wrote:
| It's because Google treats all sites with a large number of
| outbound links as a link farm and punishes them. Because Google
| couldn't figure out what list of links was organic vs spam it
| just punished everyone.
| omoikane wrote:
| For me personally, I have been trimming links I have in various
| public places because a link is a sort of endorsement, and
| these days there is always someone who gets mad at you for
| endorsing the wrong thing. Even if a personal website is mostly
| alright, someone is going to dig up a random quote out of
| context, and the rest of the internet will judge your links
| based on that one bit.
|
| Linking to a specific article on a single topic seems
| relatively safe, but linking to toplevel websites or blogs
| seems more risky.
| rchaud wrote:
| It's simple. Personal websites are the equivalent of "check my
| Linktree" for the HTML-literate. Most personal site sites I've
| seen are either boring technical blogposts or an impersonal
| online resume. People aren't showing their real personalities
| on their sites anymore.
| nobodyandproud wrote:
| Yellowpages v2? What's old is new again.
| elpachongco wrote:
| Yes! I've been thinking about this for months now. How would a
| normal person on the internet find information and enjoy the
| internet if most stuff they can find revolve around closed
| platforms, or SEO marketing sites.
|
| The best way to use the internet is to distribute information for
| everyone to see. Yet, that's not the direction it seems to be
| heading towards.
|
| I really believe that the fun part of the interner is in small
| sites, and I think we need more projects that try to find these
| small, but important corners of the internet.
| mydriasis wrote:
| This resonates with me.
|
| I've posted my language practice website on HN, LinkedIn, blah
| blah blah several places, and I can't get people to care. I've
| finally got some traction on slav facebook, but only just barely.
| Joining a web ring maybe kind of helped?
|
| It's free, actually really free, because it's something I love
| and want to share. If I post it to several places and nobody
| clicks on it... What am I supposed to do ?? Buy ads to hopefully
| get people to use my _free website_? I have tried doing stuff
| from SEO articles -- open graph tags, descriptions and stuff.
| I've posted it on social media to lukewarm reception.
|
| Someone else mentioned something like delicious. Maybe
| stumbleupon. Maybe this, maybe that. Maybe some federated
| bookmarking thing. I think there's just been a cultural shift to
| "if it's not on FaceBook it might as well not be on the
| internet", and I don't know how to get back from that. I think
| most people use their computers and phones as bootloaders for
| instagram.
| Clubber wrote:
| Something I used to do way back in the day was answer related
| questions on forums and have my website in my signature. It
| worked pretty well.
| mydriasis wrote:
| Hmm, that does sound like a good idea!
| Clubber wrote:
| Not only are you helping the community by answering
| questions, it also gives you some trackback links that
| Google used to weigh higher (not sure if it still does).
| candiddevmike wrote:
| Wonder if having a "signature" on reddit (or even HN!) like
| this would get you banned...
|
| Though there's probably a tragedy of the commons where high
| rep folks start selling signature space for
| advertising/influencer marketing.
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| I'm sure it would. They have mod bots monitoring how many
| of your links are to your own stuff. I run a totally free
| public education nuclear site (no ads, no cookies, plain
| old static HTML) and used to answer nuclear questions on
| reddit. I'd often back up what I was saying with links to
| detailed writing on my site, but I got banned from a few
| huge subs for self-promotion. Lol. So for the most part I
| just stopped answering questions on reddit.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| Having self promotion "rules" under the guise of
| "protecting communities" when it's really to force you to
| buy Reddit ads. As a user, I've found self promotion via
| comments way more helpful and relevant than their
| terrible ads...
|
| I would be fine with paying Reddit for the ability to
| (tastefully?) promote in my comments
| dhimes wrote:
| _As a user, I 've found self promotion via comments way
| more helpful and relevant than their terrible ads..._
|
| As both a user and an advertiser I agree. The communities
| I visit, if not the whole site, are faithfully anti-ad.
| But if I answer some questions occasionally somebody will
| get curious about my profile and check stuff out.
| tornato7 wrote:
| As a former Reddit mod I always found the self-promotion
| rules problematic. It effectively means you can promote
| your stuff all you want as long as you pretend you're
| someone else. It would be better to encourage people to
| stand behind their stuff. I tried not to remove self-
| promotion as long as it wasn't spammy (and there's a fine
| line there).
| radarsat1 wrote:
| Nice to see this attitude from a mod. I rarely have
| something to contribute to forums but love to read about
| people's projects. I've been in the position before of
| actually, finally, having done something I felt was worth
| sharing, a super rare occurrence for me, and then posted
| it and just getting instabanned for "self promotion".. it
| just feels like such a slap in the face from a community
| that you were enjoying being part of. Then getting into
| arguments with mods about it and eventually just having
| to unsubscribe. It hurts.
| matsemann wrote:
| In the early days it was a bonus if something was OC
| ("Original content"). Now it's frowned upon.
|
| But I think it's not just a cultural shift, but from
| being burned by everyone hustling for something. People
| want to drive you to their dropshipping business, their
| woodworking course, their OF, buy their self-help book or
| whatever.
| autoexec wrote:
| Pretending you're someone else won't help you if all you
| ever do is post links to the same site/youtube channel.
| In my experience the vast majority of the people who were
| banned for self-promotion weren't doing anything else on
| reddit except self-promotion. They'd create accounts then
| put in the absolute bare minimal amount of effort to get
| enough karma to create posts, or they'd buy up old
| accounts that already had some karma, but it was clear
| from their histories that their entire purpose in using
| reddit was exclusively promotion.
|
| They could have easily spent a few hours a week exploring
| and meaningfully participating in other subreddits that
| interested them, but they had no desire to spend that
| time or be a useful part of any community. They just
| wanted to draw viewers to whatever they were promoting.
| kej wrote:
| I went snooping in your HN profile to find the link, and
| that is a really well done site. Clean design, relevant
| pictures, and interesting material. It's probably going
| to cost me an hour or two of productivity today.
|
| Link for people lazier than me:
| https://whatisnuclear.com/
| helboi4 wrote:
| This is an amazing website. It's horrible that when
| asking educational questions you will absolutely never
| see these websites. Just the same horrible quality ones
| that are trying to take all your data and advertise to
| you.
| sudobash1 wrote:
| I see lots of people with links to a home page in their
| user profiles (on HN, StackOverflow, GitHub, etc...) I may
| be in the minority here, but if I find someone particularly
| insightful or interesting I sometimes click through to see
| if they have a link.
| HeckFeck wrote:
| @dang
|
| Sigs on HN soon pls?
| qclibre22 wrote:
| Click on user name to see their profile.
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| Please no. Too much noise.
| HeckFeck wrote:
| It was said in jest but I think everyone is taking me
| literally. I liked sigs on older phpBB forums when they
| were 2-3 lines and just some userbars. Cool back in the
| day, but they wouldn't really translate to the more
| minimalist HN.
| ricardo81 wrote:
| tbf it wouldn't be a bad signal for search engines that
| can understand forum markup.
|
| A boon for search is knowing intent and know who wrote
| something certainly helps in that regard, if a strong
| enough signal of course. Without knowing who intends
| what, you basically rely on the topic and words.
| NeoTar wrote:
| From my time in the dying days of Usenet, I can remember
| there were compact codes so you could fit as much about
| yourself into your signature as possible. Something like
| the old dating ad codes, e.g. GSoH = Good Sense of
| Humour, but more geeky.
| __d wrote:
| GeekCode, see, eg. https://geekcode.xyz/geek.html
| tjpnz wrote:
| I enjoyed yours.
| palmfacehn wrote:
| The key to creating unique content is to work backwards from
| the queries which don't satisfy you currently. Answer those
| questions and expand upon the entire category of knowledge if
| possible. If you start with just publishing whatever fits your
| fancy, you're only guaranteed to have the psychic benefit of
| putting your thoughts out there.
|
| If you have to buy ads, this means that the content you are
| producing already has large enough pool of competitors. Nothing
| wrong there, as long as you have a sustainable biz model.
|
| Understand that at the end of the day, no matter how much HN
| users disparage Google as a advertisement company, their core
| product is still search. Search is the process of bringing
| users to the content which satisfies their queries. We can
| dispute the quality of results or pine for the search landscape
| of yesteryear, but the core premise remains. Google still needs
| to produce a modicum of relevant results.
|
| SEO games will come and go. At the end of the day Google will
| always have an incentive to deliver the meaningful results
| users crave. The metrics they use to measure satisfaction will
| change, but the need for satisfactory content will not. RSS
| feeds, sitemaps, structured data and other essentials are only
| tools. At the end of the day the content is what you build.
| Many high traffic sites have completely bungled these basics
| and do well.
|
| Simple to say, harder to execute, but entirely within the realm
| of the possible. Think more about the value you are providing
| to the user.
| mydriasis wrote:
| There's no pool of competitors -- that's why I'm doing this
| in the first place. The resources for learning this stuff are
| scarce. I just don't know how to get the word out there. I'm
| not looking to make money, I just want to give this away for
| free, because I think it's worth it. I can't even give it
| away D:
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Does it matter that much if only a small number of people know
| about it?
| mydriasis wrote:
| Yes -- and this is a good question with a good answer --
| because I want to help people who might be interested in the
| language and culture find it. And I _know they're out there_
| by the number of people who at least _tried_ some really
| obscure languages on Duolingo. It's not for my own vanity, I
| want to help get the language and culture out there. The
| resources for it are scarce, and I feel like I can help
| supplement them. I'm doing the building, but I'm still
| waiting for the "they will come" bit.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Why do you assign such a high importance to 'help get the
| language and culture out there'?
|
| The small number of people who have read it will further
| disseminate it themselves if they truly believe it to be
| valuable. As long as this is more then a few dozen people,
| then that should be sufficient.
| mydriasis wrote:
| To me, language and culture have intrinsic value. I also
| feel very attached to my cultural heritage because I'm
| descended from holocaust survivors. I don't want to
| simply sit back and watch as the culture and language
| disappear, and I want to provide an entrypoint for people
| like me who are interested but perhaps have a little less
| time on their hands, or who struggle with learning
| languages.
|
| I'm planning soon to start releasing some videos where I
| read some of the old stories in English! There's not
| enough of it out there. It's important to me to preserve
| it, and the best way to preserve culture and language is
| to disseminate it.
|
| and edit -- I'm sorry you got downvoted. I think your
| question was a very good one, and I don't think the
| answer is obvious at all.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| I don't put too much stock in downvotes, there are so
| many new users joining over the past few years, some
| fraction inevitably of questionable quality, that votes
| as a signal have become much less meaningful compared to
| say 10 years ago.
|
| In fact, it's probably more of a positive signal for the
| really interested folks.
|
| I'm not quite sure how the language/culture intrinsically
| having value or not relates though. Surely it would be
| the relative strength that impacts the successful rate of
| sharing?
|
| And there are many hundreds or thousands of such
| languages and cultures competing on the internet.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| Which language? Because I've desperately been looking for a
| good resource to practice/learn Slovene that's not an expensive
| course from the University of Cleveland.
| mydriasis wrote:
| Bosnian / Croatian / Serbian. I'm adjacent to you, but I
| don't think they're quite the same, I'm afraid.
| Beijinger wrote:
| https://www.clozemaster.com/languages/learn-slovenian-online
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| Thanks, I'll check it out!
| wnevets wrote:
| > What am I supposed to do ??
|
| You're supposed to "growth hack" AKA post on popular
| subreddits, forums and sites pretending to be a casual user (or
| use bots) that links to the site while talking about how great
| it is.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Everybody with a subpar product thinks that what is lacking for
| them is exposure. Most of them start spending a lot on ads.
|
| Most probably your website is not good enough to attract a
| public.
|
| Edit: I know it sounds rude, but since you haven't linked to
| the site, there's no way to evaluate it either.
| __d wrote:
| You're confusing two Internets. It's understandable, because
| they have the same name.
|
| In one, search engines are advertising platforms, and list
| reams of content, which is also an advertising platform,
| designed to solicit revenue in one way or another.
|
| In the other, search engines are for finding information, and
| they list sites that publish
| helpful/interesting/weird/fun/whatever information for free, in
| case someone other than the author might like it.
|
| Confusing the two leads to disappointment.
| dalore wrote:
| Who remembers delicious?
|
| That was a good social bookmarking site. I wonder if anything
| similar exists now?
| HeckFeck wrote:
| There is still something of it remaining:
| https://del.icio.us/help
|
| > This site is a ghost, haunting the internet. It is a read-
| only archive of the bookmarking website del.icio.us.... This
| project is a labor of love (or more accurately, a labor of
| like). Del.icio.us was founded by my friends in 2003, sold a
| whole bunch of times, and when it was about to get sold again
| to spammers in 2017, I took the opportunity to buy it back.
| arromatic wrote:
| do you have a link to the archive ?
| mario_kart_snes wrote:
| Self-hosted version: https://github.com/Kovah/LinkAce/
| gorjusborg wrote:
| That was what came to mind for me when I read the linked
| article.
|
| For those unfamiliar:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delicious_(website)
|
| Publicly shared bookmarks was a great way to discover new
| sites, and I feel like delicious died because it was acquired,
| not because it was a bad or unpopular idea.
| derbOac wrote:
| Looping this back to some of the linked essay, I've always
| wondered if there's a way to make a social bookmarking system
| that's more decentralized or federated, through a browser
| plugin or something? Maybe something that's hosted on
| multiple hosting websites?
| brlewis wrote:
| For $22/year there's https://pinboard.in/
| tlavoie wrote:
| Yup, and comes with an API (originally cloned from
| del.icio.us IIRC), so you can back up your data or use in
| other ways. I'm always archiving updates on mine, since he
| does joke from time to time about getting hit by a bus.
| robmay wrote:
| I agree, it was my favorite site on the web before it was
| acquired.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| With shifting from Google to AI all websites will have a
| discoverability crisis. If I ask an AI "Where to buy XYZ" - how
| as a website do I get in there?
| kazakx wrote:
| So this article highlights a critical issue that urgently needs
| to be addressed. The advancement of artificial intelligence
| (AI) is partly contingent on resolving this problem. With the
| decline in search engine usage (a trend I contribute to, as I
| keep ChatGPT open all day), discovering websites becomes
| increasingly challenging. Consequently, this may lead to a
| decrease in content creation since websites are receiving less
| traffic. Ultimately, this could hinder AI development, as it
| relies on training with new and relevant data. Additionally,
| it's worth noting that this issue may extend to books as well.
| throwaway092323 wrote:
| I would love a search engine that only catalogs pages without
| ads.
| janvdberg wrote:
| I want to point out Ruben Schade bookmarks page. It's quite
| wonderful. An OPML file that is also a webpage.
|
| https://rubenerd.com/blogroll.opml
| orange-mentor wrote:
| View source on this one!
|
| Wow... I never really knew when I was visiting a website
| transformed by XSLT
|
| This is really cool
| tanepiper wrote:
| I've thought this for years that a large part of the internet is
| essentially ghosted by a lot of the bigger search engines. I miss
| the old Yahoo/AltaVista type homepage where you would get a feed.
| Digg, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us were essential tools.
|
| Geocities and MySpace had webrings, so once you landed on
| something you could generally find similar stuff.
|
| I'd love to see a good "home page" with curated feeds,
| bookmarking and search across it (and with LLM + Graph you can
| have your own semantic search)
| brisray wrote:
| The trouble with the bookmarking idea is link rot. It takes some
| effort to keep the lists up-to-date. The new webrings are not
| doing too well because of this either. I know of around 190 of
| the "new" webrings and can only get around 20% without
| encountering a 404 message.
|
| The "small web" search engines might well be the way to go. Apart
| from Kagi, some I know of are:
|
| https://search.marginalia.nu/ https://wiby.me/
| https://searchmysite.net/
| komali2 wrote:
| I have like a billion bookmarks and sometimes I tag them well,
| but sometimes I don't, and once every few months I'll go through
| the list at random and tag away.
|
| But like, what's the point of all those bookmarks? Outside of
| implementation details that are captured on stack overflow in
| convenient question - answer format, I feel like everything that
| exists on the internet already exists better in books. Even my
| own blog is basically just me stumbling though photography and
| philosophy and travel destinations, writing out information
| that's much more easily understood from published materials.
|
| Well, I suppose one thing small sites are good at is condensing
| information that should be condensed elsewhere but isn't. My most
| popular article (gets tons of organic traffic from Google) is
| titled "How to Rent a Motorcycle in Taiwan." If you searched that
| on Google I think the top few links should end in .gov.tw but
| none of them do.
| itslennysfault wrote:
| This reminds me of the early internet. Every little site had a
| "links" page or "friends" or "sister sites" or "blog roll"
|
| There were also "web rings" which was a club you could join. You
| put a widget on your site that would randomly link to other pages
| that were part of the same web ring (and you'd get back links
| from other sites).
|
| I haven't really seen any of those things in probably 10 or 15
| years though.
| keepamovin wrote:
| _Create a list of bookmarks linking to websites you find
| interesting, and publish it for the world to see...The model is
| as recursive as it is simple. There is nothing preventing a list
| of bookmarks from linking to another list of bookmarks...The
| creation of a bookmark list is a surprisingly fun project._
|
| I agree. I've often thought of people publishing a list of
| bookmarks in a way that everyone can see. I even created
| DownloadNet originally based on this idea. I wanted a way to
| publish one of my bookmark folders as a server for people.
|
| But then, as so often happens, the simple idea evolved, and I got
| carried away by who knows what (technical challenges? I don't
| know) and ended up creating a personal archive and search engine
| with only a scant integration with bookmarks.
|
| This article is a good reminder of what originally seemed to me a
| good idea. Perhaps I should add it there. Also, perhaps p2p could
| be an easy way to federate these things? Not everyone can just
| create their own server, nor do they want to host it on big
| providers always.
|
| I've been tossing around the idea of p2p as a way to "solve"
| this, but it's still rather formless: new and vague. Over the
| last 3 days I created a p2p blog (and again, got carried away --
| perhaps with technical challenges -- and added p2p chat). But I
| think there's something there.
|
| Perhaps I should listen to that idea that keeps recurring for me.
| To that first version of it anyway.
|
| Something simple, that unifies, publishing a bookmark folder (I
| have some chrome bookmark reading code^0), over p2p (I have
| janus^1), and possibly uses either the popularity of DownloadNet,
| or even some of the search/archiving stuff -- without getting
| carried away -- to assist in delivery or marketing.
|
| I don't know. A clear synthesis right now escapes me, but that's
| OK. I think there's something there: bookmarks (maybe a special
| bookmark folder, something referential, like "/var/www/html"),
| into which bookmarks go and then become public; a lightweight p2p
| server (that perhaps in some limit future could be federates
| effortlessly for p2p discovery, but who knows how?). Ugh...still
| too complex perhaps.
|
| Bookmark folder + p2p + transitive (my bookmark folder includes a
| link to another person's bookmark folder ~~ somehow).
|
| So it's like that article recently on the homepage "We need
| webrings" or sth. I didn't think that was particularly a good
| idea, but now I see at least a partial appeal.
|
| The "link" to another person's p2p bookmark "folder" will instead
| be a normal www hyperlink that links to the "signalling access
| point" where you can do the ritual to make the connection.
|
| People may think the weirdness, unavailability (you have to be
| running the little service in your terminal or as a daemon), and
| difficulty makes it a non-starter. But I think these "backward"
| elements, could be a paradoxical strength.
|
| I don't know. I think there's something there. I definitely want
| to keep pushing in this direction, anyhow.
|
| 0: https://github.com/00000o1/Bookmate 1:
| https://github.com/00000o1/janus
| kyledrake wrote:
| Neocities (disclosure: I work on it) has taken steps to try to
| improve small personal web site discoverability, which ends up
| being like a platform for people making web sites with a hybrid
| social component https://neocities.org
|
| I like the idea of calling this the small web, I usually go with
| something like "personal web site" or "home pages" but it's never
| quite stuck for me. I hope they've added Neocities to the Kagi
| small web search because there's some pretty incredible sites
| available for that and our compiled sitemap will make importing
| easy: https://neocities.org/browse
|
| The framing for this stuff is usually something like "wow
| remember the crazy 90s web" nostalgia pieces or "this is an
| active resistance against Facebook come join us in the lonely
| space nobody goes to." But really there's some incredible,
| magical content that requires the canvas the web provides, that
| isn't on the social media super-platforms and people very much
| still use the web to access them. Neocities alone serves hundreds
| of millions of views per month across all the sites, there's
| still a lot of web surfing going on.
|
| I would actually argue that having a web site gives you _more_
| exposure for your content than an average social media account,
| because sans a few lucky accounts, most are being throttled and
| limited by weird algorithms to prevent people from seeing your
| content organically. Your google search ranking might not be
| great, but people share links all over the place, including in
| private channels (think Slack /Discord/IRC/IMs) and you can still
| get meaningful distribution of your content this way.
|
| To paraphrase @izs "if you build it, they will come", is a
| misquote from a Kevin Costner movie about baseball ghosts, but if
| you build a good site with good content, people do just magically
| show up through mechanisms I don't myself quite understand yet.
| It's pretty cool to see new sites on Neocities that are unusually
| interesting and know they'll organically get view counts into the
| millions before it happens.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| I really like the stuff happening over at neocities :-)
|
| Out of curiosity, do you make any metadata available? Would be
| a very interesting resource to have, working on making the rest
| of the web discoverable as well ...
| StableAlkyne wrote:
| I just love how Neocities has webrings. They were such a great
| way to find content related to the site you're currently
| viewing
| sodapopcan wrote:
| I just deployed to my neocities site then came and saw this
| comment :D
|
| I almost got off of NeoCities recently because I thought I
| wanted to start adding dynamic parts to my website, but as
| history has shown me, whenever I start doing that I fall down a
| rabbit hole and get nothing done. So I buckled down and figured
| out how to overcome some stuff that was driving me nuts about
| Hugo and I'm back at it!
|
| NeoCities definitely has a yonger-feeling crowd for the most
| part, but I quite like it. It's nice having the feed and
| discovering all the weird stuff people put on their sites. It
| does very well at bringing back the feeling of GeoCities. I
| also love how someone brought back the 88x31 buttons!
|
| I also really appreciate the Sinatra + Sequel backend :)
| jxramos wrote:
| I'd love to see a curated awesome-list tagged github project
| "Awesome Small Web" to peruse.
|
| https://github.com/topics/awesome-list
| arromatic wrote:
| A awesome webring will be a great addition too
| hinkley wrote:
| Re: Field of Dreams
|
| If you look at this story from anyone else's perspective, right
| up until the last few moments this is a story about a man with
| untreated schizophrenia or temporal lobe seizures escalating
| his illness to the point of kidnapping someone and transporting
| them across state lines.
|
| Almost every company in the dot com boom was convinced the
| headlights at the end of their story would be vindication, not
| the ambulance coming to take them to a psychiatric ward. Almost
| all of them were wrong.
| zpeti wrote:
| My mentor who inspired me to be an entrepreneur was diagnosed
| with schizophrenia and is basically spending the rest of his
| life in hospital...
|
| I really think there's something in schizophrenia beyond the
| illness. A lot People with it normally get symptoms around
| 27-28 but achieve insane amounts before then (same as my
| mentor)
| nwiswell wrote:
| > I really think there's something in schizophrenia beyond
| the illness.
|
| I don't think there needs to be any special association.
| "Predisposed to schizophrenia" necessarily implies "not
| neurotypical", and the outcome distribution for individuals
| who are not neurotypical is much, much broader than
| neurotypical.
|
| The pinnacle of success in society has a pronounced
| overrepresention of neurodivergence, in the same way that
| pro athletes as a group have freak physical genetics.
|
| But I would expect that there are equally many people
| predisposed to schizophrenia who, rather than overachieving
| prior to symptom onset, end up dysfunctional and battling a
| variety of substance addictions.
|
| (and also I'd expect that the relative probability of these
| outcomes is highly affected by the strength of support
| networks and socioeconomic status)
| ReactiveJelly wrote:
| I had an episode of delusional schizophrenia in my early
| 20s and luckily haven't relapsed. No hallucinations, just
| started to think everything was secretly talking about me
| or to me.
|
| My pet theory is something like, my brain's dials for
| "avoid risk" and "recognize patterns" are turned up too
| high. So I breezed through a software engineering degree
| without ever partying, but I spend a lot of my time sitting
| in my house unable to motivate myself to go outside, and
| I'm not very empathetic (other people's words) and not very
| outgoing.
|
| It's not that schizophrenia makes you smart, but that
| "smart" and "schizophrenic" are both functions of some
| high-dimensional space, and the same underlying differences
| can easily cause both.
|
| On the other side, I have an elder relative who has
| paranoid schizophrenia and below normal IQ. Us in the tech
| industry are definitely going to get survivor bias from the
| "Beautiful Mind" cases around us.
|
| And of course sometimes you meet those people who are
| smart, beautiful, rich, and friendly, with no downsides,
| and all you can think is ... "You son of a bitch" :P
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| "Recognize patterns" on high is usually an asset in our
| line of work.
|
| After reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logicomix I
| wondered how many of {Cantor, Frege, Godel, Hilbert,
| Moore, Poincare, Russel, Turing, Whitehead, Wittgenstein}
| would --given a modern DX-- have been said to be "on the
| spectrum".
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| Some were wrong, but plenty were simply ahead of their time,
| at least from the perspective of the internet "fad" becoming
| a ubiquitous mainstream phenomenon.
|
| Sure, looking back some of the ideas look silly. But when you
| look at where were are today and the wide range of what's
| popular and sustainable, some of that looks silly as well.
| sodapopcan wrote:
| PS: I think shouting out neocities on HN just brought it down,
| lol. IT HAPPENS.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| Thanks for the link. I've been looking for something like that!
| oalae5niMiel7qu wrote:
| > To paraphrase @izs "if you build it, they will come", is a
| misquote from a Kevin Costner movie about baseball ghosts
|
| That movie was a remake of a much older movie.
| bluGill wrote:
| What I put on facebook is the type of thing I don't want to get
| wide reach. I don't want just anyone to see pictures of my kids
| - that is semi private information that I only want my friends
| and family to see (and you don't want to see them anyway
| because you don't know me)
| mbrameld wrote:
| > What I put on facebook is the type of thing I don't want to
| get wide reach. I don't want just anyone to see pictures of
| my kids - that is semi private information that I only want
| my friends and family to see (and you don't want to see them
| anyway because you don't know me)
|
| That's a different use case than what the GP is describing.
| Many people use social media, including Facebook, as a
| platform to build an audience of strangers.
| bluGill wrote:
| I know, but Facebook is terrible for that purpose and so I
| block anyone trying.
| rchaud wrote:
| > but if you build a good site with good content, people do
| just magically show up through mechanisms
|
| This hasn't been true for a long time, thanks to social media
| downranking posts with external links, and Google downranking
| any site that doesn't post daily updates or heaven forbid,
| doesnt have SSL enabled.
|
| A good site with good content takes time and effort to produce.
| And even then it will simply act as a feeder for people who
| will regurgitate the same information in simplified terms on a
| content blog (without a backlink of course) or social media.
| Worst case scenario, they'll try to productize that knowledge
| that was made available for free.
|
| After this happens enough times, people simply stop maintaining
| those sites.
| mario_kart_snes wrote:
| Isn't this the idea of web rings from the 90s?
| gavinhoward wrote:
| Oh boy, I'm the owner of a few small websites that have been
| blessed to be discovered.
|
| I should do this to pay back the favor. I already have a list of
| bookmarks!
|
| Problem: it has 7328 bookmarks because I save _everything_ good I
| come across, not just small websites.
|
| Give me a few hours. :)
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| You raise a good point that large collections have enough value
| to motivate people.
|
| The idea of trading "discoverables" is solid. Like in the zine
| or warez culture it's great to trade a big cache with others.
| There is a trust issue, that some will poison the well with
| their malware or spam, but many new solutions do seem to take-
| off out of mutually motivated sharing. Perhaps something as
| simple as a library/standard for "exchanging trusted link
| collections" - and there almost as in-built webserver function
| would be a game changer.
|
| Like if https://links.example.com/json always returned a most
| recently verified bundle.
| karmakaze wrote:
| > Simple federated bookmarking
|
| > A proposal, dear reader: Create a list of bookmarks linking to
| websites you find interesting, and publish it for the world to
| see. You decide what constitutes "interesting".
|
| For federated content, we could use ActivityPub if the site
| content units are posts. At some point, there should be a
| searchable taxonomy of the federated groupings and sources.
| jlturner wrote:
| Maybe a big Google query prefix to hide all major sites?
| VikingCoder wrote:
| I've have this weird idea in my head:
|
| There's a book I love, Daemon. I love it so much that I'm willing
| to bet you money that you'll love it. How about I buy you a copy
| of the book, and if you love it, you have to buy a copy for two
| other people?
|
| Or... how about, I bet you $1 that you'll enjoy this website. If
| I'm wrong, you keep the money - or maybe it goes to a charity of
| your choice? If I'm right, I get my money back... and maybe you
| have to give me $1...? and you have to pick two other people to
| gamble?
|
| I dunno - the thought has been tickling my brain for a while...
| runamuck wrote:
| I love this post. Share more "crazy" ideas!
| Minor49er wrote:
| Someone would just create a bunch of fake accounts to exploit
| the userbase and redeem all of the free stuff
| VikingCoder wrote:
| My idea is that this is just between you and people you
| actually know. First-hand.
| Minor49er wrote:
| In that case, why not just buy your friends or colleagues
| copies of the book as a gift?
| VikingCoder wrote:
| Because I want it to go viral? Especially when it's a new
| author, and I really want to support them. It's not just
| about finding good books for my friends, it's about
| finding customers for authors / creators I really enjoy.
| gessha wrote:
| I have this thing with one of my friends where, if I really
| enjoy a piece of media and I want to recommend it to the other
| person, I would watch it _again_ with them because watching it
| for a second time shows there isn't anything more interesting
| right now than the media I'm recommending.
| agentultra wrote:
| Remember when content creators of yore were teaching the web
| newbies how to generate traffic to their sites and get noticed on
| search engine rankings?
|
| We still have that now. Only it's how to get the YouTube
| algorithm to share your content or how to optimally use Steam's
| tools to promote your game. It's all within the walled gardens.
|
| Even Google, a search engine of yore, is a walled garden now much
| more like a social network than it's prior iterations when it was
| an indispensable tool for finding new content on the web.
| mo_42 wrote:
| Every thought we express, happens in the context of something
| we've read or discussed etc. before. For example, this comment is
| based on the original text linked, the comments here on HN, and
| my own thoughts.
|
| I think a writer should include all the references that lead to
| their thoughts expressed in the texts. This way the reader could
| follow these links to explore more adjacent topics. To me, it
| seems like the ecosystem of small website could improve on that.
| I'd rather explore other writers based on some topic than on a
| blogroll.
|
| In scientific writing this has a long tradition called related
| work. In some fields it degraded a bit into a section that merely
| lists all the works that should be named rather than a deep
| discussion of their contents.
|
| Obviously, this is also the original idea of Berners-Lee for the
| web.
|
| A good example that comes to my mind is this:
| https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/somewhat-contra-marcus-on-a...
| rakoo wrote:
| I'm not a fan of a bland list of websites, because it feeds into
| my FOMO and either I find the courage to click on all the links
| to add them to the pile of I-will-read-this, or more likely I
| realize I will never have the time to do it and just close the
| website.
|
| A better model is to have a list of bookmarks, to specific pages
| if needed, _with_ a small description of why it 's worth looking
| at it. That's the model of shared bookmarking behind shaarli (and
| others before it), and it's much more amenable to serendipity: I
| can subscribe to your rss feed, you probably don't add an entry
| every single day so I will have time to look at it, and I'll get
| to discover other websites.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| > Create a list of bookmarks linking to websites you find
| interesting, and publish it for the world to see.
|
| I do like this idea. But it begs a few questions:
|
| - Where?
|
| - And then what?
|
| The problem statement is that its hard to discover small
| websites. If I publish my bookmarks on my small website then the
| problem has not been solved. It seems like there needs to be some
| aggregator which of course ventures directly into the problem of
| centralized distribution and algorithms making the little guy
| undiscoverable. Whats the solution? A site with "friends" whose
| lists you can see with no overall aggregation?
|
| Personally, I actually think it would be interesting to aggregate
| these lists. In particular I think it would be interesting to
| find the most common domains below a certain threshold of
| popularity. Pretty sure you can do this on google already,
| although youd have to save the string and copy paste it in all
| the time.
| QwertyPi wrote:
| We've needed a search engine that excludes the work of corporate
| giants that dominate our modern internet for a while. It's just
| never been so clear and dire as today.
|
| Interestingly google _used_ to have a per-user, user-controlled
| domain blacklist that go excised around ~2008 or so--presumably
| because this would have enabled automated blocking of high-value
| clients.
| mbforbes wrote:
| I like this author's idea of curating bookmark lists, but I think
| they are most effective when two criteria are followed: (1) keep
| the list small, (2) write small notes about each entry.
|
| For example, the bookmarks list the author links to
| (https://www.marginalia.nu/links/bookmarks/) has 48 URLs
| annotated only by category. That's too many for my tiny brain to
| handle and I move on.
|
| A webring like Hundred Rabbits' (https://webring.xxiivv.com/) has
| 203 entries. For me, this is in the same category as 48. (It also
| reminds me of those "Awesome X" lists on GitHub that end up
| flooded with hundreds of links.)
|
| To attempt an example of what I mean, here's the bookmark list I
| publish on my website:
|
| - Bret Victor (http://worrydream.com/) * interaction and
| abstraction
|
| - Craig Mod (https://craigmod.com/) * long walks, atmospheric
| photos
|
| - Hundred Rabbits (https://100r.co/site/home.html) * physical and
| digital minimalism from first principles, extensively documented
|
| - Mu-An Chiou (http://muan.co/) * rhythm, space, movement, color
|
| - Steven Wittens (http://acko.net/) * 3D sorcery
|
| (edit: formatting)
| brynet wrote:
| On my personal website [0] I've kept a small list of "mildly
| interesting sites" which just gets duplicated onto each page (all
| static HTML), but it feels like I've only ever removed dead links
| from it and rarely added anything.
|
| [0] https://brynet.ca/
| jrmg wrote:
| I think that part of this is that small web sites simply are not
| being indexed by Google at all any more.
|
| My ~15 year old blog has, according to Google Search Console, 15
| indexed pages, and 174 'Discovered - currently not indexed'
| pages. The number of indexed pages is going _down_ over time,
| despite occasional new posts.
|
| The Search Console page says "Examine the issues [...] to decide
| whether you need to fix these URLs." But about the only
| suggestion I can find is just to wait for them to be indexed -
| which doesn't seem to ever happen.
|
| I wouldn't argue my blog is the best or most exciting content in
| the world or anything, but I can't believe anyone would say it's
| worse than the often-incorrect SEO-informed duplicative nonsense
| that fills the first few pages of Google search results for
| anything technical nowadays.
| h1fra wrote:
| It's even worse on brand new website, google will index your
| homepage and ignore everything else unless it has some external
| links. Even with a good sitemap and good usability score.
| michaelbuckbee wrote:
| This is a well known phenomenon of "Google Jail" where to
| combat spammers just setting up hordes of new sites, getting
| dinged and then migrating to a new domain, Google penalizes
| new sites until they've been "aged" for some number of
| months.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Dunno if it's about age so much as it is context. Like my
| search engine does something similar. The actual text on
| the pages are only a fraction of the signals used by search
| engines to put a website to put the putative search result
| into context.
|
| It's really hard to rank a website if there are no links or
| traffic to it.
| ushercakes wrote:
| It's not just you - this is widespread.
|
| I run a SaaS to help site owners get their content indexed.
| We're seeing an influx of users, I think a lot of the issue is
| simply because of AI.
|
| New web page additions were pretty linear over time, and then
| AI copywriting tools came out. Suddenly page additions
| basically went "hockey stick"/vertical.
|
| Now, you can publish thousands of pages in a few minutes, and
| it's created a huge backlog in Googles crawl queue, thus
| increasing overall time to get indexation, disproportionally
| affecting smaller sites.
| autoexec wrote:
| > I run a SaaS to help site owners get their content indexed.
| We're seeing an influx of users, I think a lot of the issue
| is simply because of AI.
|
| I think that google just isn't interested in putting
| resources into their search engine anymore. They used to need
| it to gather data on people and what they were doing online,
| but chrome gives them people's internet histories now and
| android lets them collect endless amounts of data on people's
| lives offline. Google doesn't need search to spy on us
| anymore. It's only natural that they'd let it stagnate.
| hexo wrote:
| nothing is indexed by gogle anymore. it doesnt work at all as
| its supposed to for a long time. forget about it.
| waveBidder wrote:
| you don't serve Google ads like the SEO crap. hopefully the
| antitrust action breaks up that particular conflict of
| interest.
| m-i-l wrote:
| Same here - most of my personal site has been stuck in Google's
| "Discovered - currently not indexed" limbo for nearly 2 years,
| despite regularly submitting pages for indexing, and doing all
| the usual things like optimising Lighthouse score and so on. I
| went on the Google Search support forums and it was quite sad -
| just vast numbers of people crying into the void. It is almost
| like Google have given up on search.
|
| If they actually wanted to improve it, the key would be to move
| away from the advertising funded model - as Larry Page and
| Sergey Brin warned in 1998 "advertising funded search engines
| will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from
| the needs of the consumers"[0]. Personally I think they could
| at least pay running costs with a paid support model - it might
| not earn as much money as advertising, but as a gateway to the
| internet and other Google services it could still be very
| valuable to both Google and their users.
|
| [0] "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search
| Engine", Computer Networks, vol. 30 (1998), pp. 107-117,
| (noting that the quote is in Appendix A which seems to be
| missing from some more recent online versions).
| bluGill wrote:
| 40 years ago news organizations (news papers, radio, and TV)
| had strict policies that the ad department (which was always
| in house - never outsourced to doubleclick/google) was not
| allowed to talk to the news department. You bought an ad
| because you wanted to reach people who wanted news from
| orginizations would "bite the hand that fed them". Internet
| ads don't seem to have that. They could, the culture existed
| before in other forms and wouldn't be hard.
| Aerbil313 wrote:
| There is a big software discoverability crisis, not just
| websites. The same software gets reinvented a thousand times a
| day by the industry because that battle-tested FOSS software is
| lost in the depths of the internet.
|
| Idk what will solve it. My bet is on a specialized web-scraped
| database specialized for OS software with an LLM frontend.
| s17n wrote:
| Is it true that "traffic is evaporating" for smaller sites? I'd
| love to see some numbers.
|
| Keep in mind that overall traffic on the internet was orders of
| magnitude lower back in the heyday of quirky personal sites.
| rambambram wrote:
| I added a bookmark list (or call it a webring or a blogroll) to
| my website software Hey Homepage (link in bio) and I call it
| 'shared links'. Indeed, nothing more than a list of interesting
| links. I also present this list as an OPML file and I dubbed this
| whole concept 'Other People's Meaningful Links' (not my own
| abbr).
|
| This kind of thing is so crucial for discoverability, I want to
| do more with it and I hope this topic gets discussed more on HN.
| starkparker wrote:
| > A proposal, dear reader: Create a list of bookmarks linking to
| websites you find interesting, and publish it for the world to
| see. You decide what constitutes "interesting".
|
| > The model is as recursive as it is simple. There is nothing
| preventing a list of bookmarks from linking to another list of
| bookmarks.
|
| This + friend-of-friend commenting on shared bookmarks = Google
| Reader's "Note in Reader" bookmarklet + friends shared items[1]
| feature.
|
| For the people who used shared items, the RSS feed reader part of
| Reader was just another way to generate shared items. The shared
| items list could be public and positive engagement was broadly
| open, but commenting on shared items was limited to designated
| friends and their friends.
|
| This made the sharing aspect sticky. Sharing and commenting on
| items helped you expand your friends list, which exposed you to
| more shared items, for which you could be the aggregating conduit
| that shared unique items (including bookmarklet-captured items
| with no corresponding feed) for people on the other side of the
| friendship wall.
|
| Those groups grew organically and were socially insulated from
| abuse. By definition everyone involved knew or had to vouch for
| each other, even without real names. And aside from blocking
| individual users, severing a mutual friend connection effectively
| cut them off from visibility to others.
|
| It was fantastic.[2]
|
| 1: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-readers-gets-
| more...
|
| 2: https://www.buzzfeed.com/robf4/googles-lost-social-network
| higgins wrote:
| I've noticed this too. My art/advertising project
| (https://24HourHomepage.com) let's people advertise themselves
| for free. Lots of people promote their IG/Twitter/Tiktok etc.
|
| I'm not surprised given how much "influencer economy" marketing
| there is (also, I advertise the site on Tiktok/IG/YT) but I'm
| over-joyed when I see good ol' fashioned websites.
|
| Even then, they seem to be older sites :/
|
| Other good sources for small website discovery: -
| https://cloudhiker.net/ - https://theuselessweb.com/ -
| https://www.boredbutton.com/
| renegat0x0 wrote:
| My own repositories:
|
| - bookmarked entries https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-
| Database
|
| - mostly domains https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-
| Database
|
| - all 'news' from 2023 https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-
| Database-2023
|
| I am using my own Django program to capture and manage links
| https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive.
| permanentacc wrote:
| Instead of putting links to interesting websites on a bookmarks
| page you could link to related content within the main body of
| the article itself. You or I don't know if I'd want to read more
| about a website about 'humanities' or 'misc', but since I'm
| reading through this article you know I'm willing to read about
| small websites. So, if you have read anything relevant about
| small website discovery, Gemini, or web rings, you could link to
| it from where you mention it in the article.
| PumpkinSpice wrote:
| This is actually a very lucid way to frame this. People love to
| complain that "Google is useless now," but it's pretty clearly
| not the case if you look at how most people use search.
|
| What they usually mean is "nobody can find my interesting hobby
| projects and I can't find theirs." And that definitely tracks. As
| a person who poured a lot of energy into completely free, non-
| commercial educational content, it grinds my gears that there are
| 2-3 pages of derivative blogspam peppered with affiliate links -
| and increasingly, LLM-generated drivel - ahead of me.
|
| What I think we get wrong is demanding that others fix it for us,
| though. Yeah, it's the cool part of the internet, but it's a
| commercially insignificant one. What the article is trying to do
| - pick a specific practical solution and lead by example - is
| probably better. Even if it's a rehash of what we tried in the
| pre-Google days.
| shoknawe wrote:
| This is a great post. I have about 10000 links saved in Pinboard
| over the past 10 years and to figure out how I could share.
| rambambram wrote:
| Right now, I use Hey Homepage myself to follow around 850 other
| websites and their updates. I follow some computer and car news.
| I follow some 'dev blogs' with weekly or monthly updates. I
| follow some timelines from people that post shorter but more
| frequent posts (like Twitter). I even follow some Youtube
| channels without being exposed to their algorithm.
|
| What I'm missing and would like to see more of, are feeds about
| hobbies/activities other than computer-related stuff. I might be
| in a bubble or I'm dealing with early adopters, but the only
| quality feeds I encounter are from programmers who write about...
| programming. I put my money where my mouth is and added a
| microblog/timeline to my website about building a bicycle caravan
| (see theredpanther.org).
|
| What I also miss are more 'photo feeds'. Every update in a feed
| can have a picture included, why not make more use of that!? It
| sparks some live into the dull text-only format. Adding a photo
| now and then also makes the webview of the a timeline more
| interesting. Just as Twitter-posts can have a picture attached. I
| make extensive use of photos on a niche site of mine about
| beautiful cars. Go check Artomotive
| (https://www.heyhomepage.com/site/artomotive).
|
| The technical side of these things isn't new or innovative. And
| that's the beauty, it's proven technology. No hype, just natural
| growth. The technology behind 'feeds' (it's called RSS, I call it
| 'Really Social Sites') is twenty years old now. It's not tainted
| by surveillance capitalism, commercialism, algorithms, platforms
| or AI. But to get the most out of it, you have to do some things.
| Like collecting interesting feeds/websites to follow, clicking to
| read the whole article, playing the algorithm yourself by
| curating the stream of content, etc. But if you want to stay sane
| on a changing internet, it seems the only way.
| activescott wrote:
| Google buying up Feedburner only to shut it down didn't help the
| small websites federated via RSS/Atom either. Seems like it was
| replaced with centralized medium now. BTW Is there a good
| feedburner alternative out there?
| asimpletune wrote:
| It's hard for small, beautiful websites to get traction. One big
| issue is engaging with a small audience, like having a commenting
| system, without imposing an account signup on your readers or
| having them login with Facebook.
|
| What do other HN'ers think about the UX of using email for
| accepting comments? Sort of like a form submission. Details
| linking the comment and the parent post could be stored in mailto
| links. I posted an Ask HN before seeing this post that has more
| details https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38278697
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Why do you need comment fields?
|
| I always figure, if someone wants to talk to me, they can send
| me an email, and popular blog posts, like the one we're
| discussing now, generally end up having comment fields on sites
| such as Hacker News.
| asimpletune wrote:
| Well that's exactly what I mean. Comments fields aren't a
| requirement, but I disagree that HN and other sites are an
| acceptable replacement.
|
| A much more suitable replacement is like you said, sending an
| email.
| pkdpic wrote:
| Well I'm sold, Im re-adding my links section to my personal site.
| But this time more links less curating.
| arromatic wrote:
| Does any one know if it is possible to teach a llm to
| differentiate between a small web website and a commercial one ?
| zackmorris wrote:
| Netizens should own the means of consumption.
|
| To show how old I feel, my friends and I had a vision for where
| the web was going in the 90s. We wanted a shareware future where
| anyone and their grandma could save their MS Word file to a
| shared drive on their computer and point a domain name at it for
| a few dollars per year. Then use a real version of PayPal with no
| transaction fees to accept micropayments. To maybe write casual
| games priced at $10 and sell a few hundred copies per month to
| enter pretirement. Or make pottery and sell it themselves rather
| than on Etsy, and actually get found and paid.
|
| Of course that future never materialized, or more accurately was
| quickly overshadowed by the attention economy which makes nothing
| and sells nothing.
|
| Through that lens, it's easy to see where search engines went
| wrong. There should have been a public domain database of the web
| and its metadata like archive.org, but fully indexed and
| queryable through SQL. Search engines could be built above that
| with clever queries, but the database would always be available
| to all of us. Then we could have search that does the opposite of
| what corporations do, and actually make long tail results the
| most prominent. Instead we got the ensh*ttification of the very
| best stuff like Google, bringing the worst aspects of capitalism
| to what should have been a free human economy of ideas on its way
| to delivering a moneyless society.
|
| I would very much like to work on all of this and help bring us
| back to the bright future of 1999. I'd also like to write
| declarative stateless programming languages and AI that actually
| does people's work for them to get them paid instead of robbing
| them of their creative opportunities. Basically put real effort
| and resources into undoing whatever all this is and get back to
| the real work of solving the prerequisites needed to roll out
| UBI. Instead like most of you, I'll likely spend the rest of my
| life throwing all of my energy at the hardest problems with the
| smallest rewards to make rent. A tragedy of the commons on such a
| vast scale that we can't even see it.
|
| I still have faith that AI will deliver the semantic web and
| maybe this could all materialize, since human-curated metadata
| was always a pipe dream. But I worry that the trillion dollar
| tech status quo will stop this. Mainly because revisionist
| history has turned what were once deep insights and winning
| strategies into easily discreditable flights of fancy and
| idealism. That's why search engines were corrupted in the first
| place.
| alexashka wrote:
| Websites are last century tech - everything else is a natural by-
| product of that.
|
| If small websites were a good idea, myspace would have won - it
| was the ultimate 'create your own little website' 'thing'.
|
| The real crisis is _app_ discoverability. Unless you 're put on
| the front page by Google or Apple - good luck getting your app to
| gain traction without giving half your company away to get
| venture funding to afford to spam people's lives with
| advertising.
|
| _That 's_ the real crisis - we don't have discoverability
| services and rely on spam because the companies that control the
| internet profit from selling ability to spam people. Websites - I
| don't even know the last time I visited a _new_ website multiple
| times (aka none of them have provided any lasting value) - it
| must 've been years ago and I'm on the internet _all the time_.
| hettygreen wrote:
| How do people find links on the darkweb?
| shams93 wrote:
| Google is also a part of the problem here because everything is
| automated if Google wanted to help nurture the creative web they
| could at least feature new sites on web.dev.
| Moggie100 wrote:
| Somewhat obvious disclaimer that this is my own stab at this a
| little while back: https://johnvidler.co.uk/blog/federated-web-
| rings-and-link-s... with its associated search tool:
| https://johnvidler.co.uk/webgraph/
|
| I tried to come up with a spec for listing bookmarks in an easily
| handled format for both humans and machines, and just ended up
| with using .json files; here's mine for example:
| https://johnvidler.co.uk/webgraph.json which all follow a very
| loose specification. Because it just requires a single file to
| connect to others using the same system its really easy to
| implement.
|
| I've been slowly pushing for folks I know to add to the sources
| that the search engine can idly spider, slowly building up a
| large searchable list of user-selected links.
| helpfulmountain wrote:
| This is kind of blowing my mind, but I'm looking for people
| discussing the proposal here and can't quite find the valence
| that seems most potentially viral or self-perpetuating:
|
| There seems to be a really exciting incentive to share lots of
| links, to regularly hit a hotkey to add the current page to a
| link list, because there is a kind of graph traversal thing that
| can emerge, akin to recommendation engines spotify or youtube
| use, whereby your (anonymized) "like history" -- might be
| interesting to include some metadata, including when it was
| liked, how you arrived there, whatever -- will connect you with
| other people who have intersecting likes, and then blow open
| entire other leaves of search trees you didn't know you wanted.
|
| I have this feeling on the net recently where I feel like
| starved, it just feels so stale and bland, hard to find actually
| good content, going back to HN or Twitter or Reddit or whatever,
| these little linear "feeds" with discussions etc.
|
| I want a feeling of opening-up, branching, discovery, excitement.
|
| I feel like if a bunch of people shared their like histories in a
| pseudonymous fashion, you could see these fascinating interest
| clusters emerging and if there was a compelling UI for navigating
| them, it could really be self-perpetuating and awesome.
|
| Sort of like visualizations of LLM embeddings, showing regional
| clusters of information domains, but with a navigable, social
| aspect, and where because it's pseudo-anonymous you don't mind
| running AI recommendation engines on it for you and others.
|
| Does this exist? Should it? I would love something like this!
| mattlondon wrote:
| What is to stop a list of bookmarks not also just being a load of
| links to spam and astroturfing? You could argue "ah well you have
| to just use the ones from websites you trust!" But that is
| basically PageRank when you think about it. So we're back to the
| same problems.
|
| I guess we can't have nice things.
| 101008 wrote:
| This might not be the appropriate thread to ask this, but I feel
| that if I create an Ask HN with just this, nobody will see it and
| I won't get any responses.
|
| I've been running a website for over 15 years, something popular,
| on a specific topic. It has no ads; I only have Patrons who give
| me between 100 and 200 dollars per month. I don't get many visits
| (between 800 and 1200 per day, except on special days with some
| news where I can get many more).
|
| I grew up in the era of web rings and old websites, and aside
| from being very nostalgic, I would love to go back to that. And I
| know that if I don't start, others won't either. But I have this
| constant debate about whether I should do it and follow my
| desires or what the audience wants. I feel that if I do that,
| people will stop taking the website seriously. Unfortunately,
| visitors come to my website, and if they don't see something
| modern and well-done, they won't take it seriously.
|
| So I'm between a rock and a hard place: do I follow my desires
| and do what I like, knowing that it may cost me an audience? Or
| do I adapt to trends to try to get more visits and new readers?
|
| I don't know if anyone has the answer, but I would like to hear
| your opinions (any type of opinion is welcome).
| sideshowb wrote:
| What do you want from your website: side hustle or hobby?
| You're allowed to enjoy stuff without making money...
| 101008 wrote:
| Sorry - I gave the example of the Patrons to give an idea of
| how much people consume me. I don't do it for the money - I
| invest a lot of money in fact, paying contributors, etc. I
| just want to be an important voice in this topic and have
| some kind of influence.
| sideshowb wrote:
| You could have it both ways with a prominent "retro mode"
| button to let users switch css?
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| Can't you do both? Stick with an aesthetic your visitors
| expect, but also add web rings and other feature that are
| throwback-y but styled to look new?
|
| It's hard to say without being able to understand your
| visitors, their expectations, and how much wiggle room that
| leaves you to be you.
| CM30 wrote:
| Nothing says you can't sorta do both. You can have a simple but
| clean looking website that both makes people nostalgic for the
| old days yet is still easy to navigate in the modern era, and
| that website can be part of whatever webrings you want to be
| part of.
|
| Besides, what people count as modern or usable varies a lot
| depending on the niche, and if your content is good enough...
| well, you can get away with a lot of archaic design there. I
| mean, look at Serebii.net. Biggest Pokemon site in the world,
| probably the defacto source for information for many people in
| the community... and it's barely updated its layout in the last
| decade or two.
|
| Heck, in more niche subject areas you have literally every
| website sticking to fairly traditional web design principles.
| Retro gaming and computing sites (like those about 8-bit
| computers, video game mods or demoscene stuff) tend to look
| about as retro as their subject area, and very few people care
| about that.
|
| So, either mix them together since these things aren't
| necessarily mutually exclusive, or do whatever knowing that if
| your content is good enough, the aesthetics won't exactly
| matter a huge deal.
| kazinator wrote:
| A billion small websites cannot be discoverable all at once.
|
| The search engine is an extension of the pop culture treadmill.
| It determines what is popular.
|
| Some sites inherently deserve to be popular, like "horses'
| mouths" primary sources of important information.
|
| For others, it's just a popularity crapshoot.
|
| It's the same like in music or anything else. A million equally
| talented singers cannot all simultaneously get to be popular
| idols; you cannot introduce that many people to a nation. At some
| point it's a lottery.
|
| That doesn't amount to a "crisis".
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| There are definitely more web surfers than there are web sites,
| so reasonably speaking, most of them, at least the ones built
| by human beings, should be able to get at least a modicum of
| traffic.
|
| The reason we have such concentration of popularity today is
| that we use popularity to direct traffic. That starts feeding
| into itself fairly rapidly, and the result is inevitably that
| the same few websites eat virtually all of the traffic.
| defanor wrote:
| I like this approach, more than webrings: it forms a graph,
| rather than a linked list, which is more reliable, and basically
| what the "web" metaphor is about. So I both have a "links" page
| on my homepage, and trying to link relevant resources from public
| notes.
|
| Embedding RDFa metadata seems potentially useful for forming a
| graph and helping with exploration as well, but it does not seem
| to be used much.
| ss64 wrote:
| The difficulty with this is linkrot. It is not just that links
| break, but they change into content farms or domain squatters and
| unless you are constantly checking them, your neat collection of
| links quickly becomes useless.
| tmnvix wrote:
| I've recently thought that a return to site directories might be
| overdue.
|
| Possibly something based on the dewey system.
|
| If I'm interested in making shoes, I want to see a list of
| relevant sites (or videos, etc) that have been vouched for
| (possibly with comments) by actual humans. Obviously
| rating/review abuse is a hard problem, but imagine if most
| subreddits had a list of quality sites as determined by users of
| the subreddit. Then imagine it without the reddit bit.
| jeffreyw128 wrote:
| Check out http://metaphor.systems/ - neural embeddings based
| search that is really good at finding the longtail of high
| quality content.
|
| Really good for finding personal pages, niche blog posts, etc..
| Algorithm doesn't at all weigh website popularity explicitly.
|
| (Disclaimer: I'm one of the cofounders)
| krembo wrote:
| All Facebook and Twitter profiles are the personal websites and
| blogs of this era. The benefit of having a dedicated "website" is
| between none to negative.
| rchaud wrote:
| > But I'm just going to state that automatic link feeds do not
| seem to work on HTTP any more. You end up with a flood of
| astroturfing, vapid click-bait and blogspam (i.e. reddit).
|
| This would be true for anything that has a critical mass of users
| which would make it a target for astroturfers and spammers.
|
| The likely reason Gemini has managed to escape that is because
| it's a text-only alternative protocol that only a very few people
| would be interested in joining.
| creer wrote:
| "Web sites"? Isn't a large part of the useful small web about
| single projects or pages?
|
| And then discoverability is what HN does - although scalability
| is not there.
|
| That is, it's not all that important that someone has a personal
| site with travel photos. If in there they have 3 awesome reviews
| and summaries of economics books then I'd like to find THOSE.
| There is no or there should be no obligation of consistency, body
| of work, or overall project in discovering worthy single essays.
|
| Something like "long form cooperative bookmarking"?
| p4bl0 wrote:
| I feel like less and less small personal website owners maintain
| a list of links to other personal websites they like. That's too
| bad because I think this is a fantastic way to discover those
| parts of the web :).
|
| Here is my link list: https://pablo.rauzy.name/links.html
| lencastre wrote:
| delicio.us or whatever how many periods were
| pilgrim0 wrote:
| "curated link directories were a thing back when the Internet was
| in its infancy, but the task of maintaining such a directory is a
| full time job"
|
| Here's the economically viable answer. It could be a job in the
| same sense as a YouTuber. I imagine lists being distributed
| through releases, not an infinite, always-on feed. Releases would
| not consist of links only, but actual context. A well known
| curator could use his reach to leverage smaller projects, the
| political factor of course would be present. It's not so
| different than what people already do on social networks, and
| that's a good sign. The main difference would be that the linked
| content would be sourced from around the web, not only from
| within a particular network. Ad business could also flourish in
| this context. Ads can be really useful. For people with interest
| in a given topic, it is valuable to get access to offers
| regarding the activity. You could have people literally making a
| living just by thoughtfully wandering on the web and collecting
| media with a niche public in mind. The mere act of selection from
| the curator would be an expression of individuality, even more so
| if they enrich the published volume with their view. It would
| reach a point where you would simply submit your content to the
| curator network, bypassing search engines entirely. I would also
| add that a fully curated internet would feel extremely safe,
| since you'd always know what to expect from the sources you
| subscribe to, and also considering media would flow downstream in
| a parallel fashion, so no intersection of undesirable content. It
| would be beautiful if it all happened through a torrent or
| torrent-like protocol.
| MentallyRetired wrote:
| Real question: Could machine learning be used to identify these
| sites to a high degree of accuracy, with crowd sourced human
| moderation denying the false positives to help further train it?
|
| Disclaimer: I know very little about machine learning.
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