[HN Gopher] Where Have All the Websites Gone?
___________________________________________________________________
Where Have All the Websites Gone?
Author : benrutter
Score : 382 points
Date : 2024-01-09 08:13 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.fromjason.xyz)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.fromjason.xyz)
| nickweb wrote:
| I think that as the author notes, we have gone. And I think it's
| because we grew up. We don't have the spare time like we used to,
| which, inevitably means we don't access same sites, depriving
| them of visitors and relevant revenue.
|
| We've gone.
| dt3ft wrote:
| We've gone, but replacement never came. They got stuck on
| twitter, discord, tiktok, twitch, snapchat.
|
| Websites are difficult to build for the average Joe. Having a
| personal website doesn't seem to be cool anymore. The number of
| followers on platform xyz seems to be the thing today. Lets
| hope the trend dies out and personal websites become cool
| again.
| Baldbvrhunter wrote:
| it is the centralisation of visitor count widgets, guestbooks
| and web-rings on geocities
| lurker616 wrote:
| It's like saying, I hope the new pop music trends that all
| the kids are listening to dies out, and 80s rock becomes cool
| again. It just isn't gonna happen.
| dt3ft wrote:
| I think you're right. It is likely never going to happen.
| krapp wrote:
| Except 80s rock is cool again.
|
| A lot of people here are still thinking with a pre-
| internet mindset, where because pop culture was mediated
| by the distribution of physical media or broadcasts at
| specific times, awareness of certain genres of music and
| pop-cultural touchstones was strictly gatekept by time,
| and trends were distinctly linear and generational.
|
| But now _all of that_ is discoverable at the same time.
| "the kids these days" aren't limited to what's trendy
| now, and it isn't more difficult to find 80's music than
| it is the latest tik-tok. And faux-nostalgia
| (neostalgia?) seems to be a constant pop human culture
| (indeed, much of it is manufactured by the corporations
| that control pop culture.) There are whole genres of new
| music like vaporwave and aesthetic movements that
| incorporate (at least a vague idea of) the 80s. People
| watch old shows from the 80s and 90s on Youtube. They
| look back on a time they never participated in as if it
| were a golden age of low-tech simplicity.
|
| Of course, the general rule is things become cool again
| after 20 years to now I guess that would be... the
| millennium?
|
| As far as personal websites go, the biggest reason the
| aren't likely to make a comeback is simply that hand-
| coding HTML and running a webserver has no utility for
| most people. Even considering all of the negatives of
| social media and centralization (which, let's be honest,
| is the fault of many of the people now complaining that
| the web is no longer cool) the model of software as a
| service allows people to publish to the web far more
| easily.
|
| And who knows? "the kids these days" are as aware of the
| dangers of social media as anyone, that's why they won't
| be caught dead on Facebook or Twitter, they're all on
| Discord now or wherever. Maybe personal websites will
| catch on too just because of retro nostalgia as well.
| mym1990 wrote:
| I just don't think the idea that we don't have spare time is
| true. People prove that they have time to spend ample amounts
| of time on the big social apps. The truth is that it is much
| easier to check out and scroll mindlessly for an hour or two,
| versus finding meaningful creations on the web.
| plastic3169 wrote:
| Website is great if you want to publish a document. Collect
| information in one place. Most of the daily stuff is just human
| communication better served by forums, tweets, images, news,
| e-mails, chats, tik toks etc. These natively work better in apps
| or app like sites where the information comes and goes gets lost
| or never even gets discovered. If we worry about the information
| siloing up we should build communication web thats not owned by
| big corps. It's like the open source side stopped building the
| protocol after web 1.0 was finished and left all the emergent use
| cases for start ups to solve.
| meinheld111 wrote:
| > It's like the open source side stopped building the protocol
| after web 1.0 was finished and left all the emergent use cases
| for start ups to solve.
|
| Interesting take
| robertlagrant wrote:
| I'm not sure it's true exactly - OSS had email as one type of
| messaging, and IRC as another. The problem is that email
| lacks instant-ness (and for a long time you couldn't send
| larger files as attachments), and IRC lacks, or lacked, rich
| functionality.
|
| Messaging seems to just require more hardware, so the
| significance of whether the software is OSS or not is
| reduced.
| didntcheck wrote:
| I'd say IRC is a good example of one of the flaws of FOSS
| culture - the tendency to get cemented on the first working
| minimum viable solution, but then become too ossified to
| ever improve on it. IRC was great for its time, but it
| doesn't have remotely the minimum set of features the
| average person expected of a messenger solution 10 years
| ago. After the initial success of FOSS in chat protocols,
| almost all of the improvements came from commercial
| software, and it was too difficult to coordinate
| introduction of new features across all the implementations
|
| And a lot of this is not even technical, but the cultural
| issue of scorning anyone asking for those features and
| claiming those use cases are just for teenagers. Real men
| just use plain ASCII and no multimedia apparently. Only
| after its lunch was soundly eaten did we finally get IRCv3,
| way too late, and still with little support. The reason a
| lot of younger developers are using Slack and Discord isn't
| because they're stupid kids, but because their requirements
| aren't met otherwise, and they're not going to constrain
| themselves to 90s tech out of stubbornness (to be clear I'm
| not accusing _you_ of that attitude! I 'm commenting on
| others I've seen many times over the years)
| pixl97 wrote:
| Eh, evolving a protocol is a difficult political issue.
|
| In a business selling software, if you're willing to take
| some sales loss/mad customers, you can just say in
| software 2.0, you're going to protocol 2.0.
|
| On the open web/OSS the rest of the world can tell you to
| screw off... or they can just not upgrade and your
| software that's a step ahead breaks. Then you also have
| commercial interests that shove FOSS/1.0 on some device
| and want to change users to upgrade the firmware so users
| stay on the old stuff forever.
|
| Commercial software tended to get more features because
| the software was based on monopolies they had full
| control of.
| iamcasen wrote:
| I feel this, but likely because I am a software engineer and PC
| tinkerer from the '90's.
|
| Everything that get's created, gets commercialized and
| swallowed up by whatever product roadmap that commercial entity
| has. The soul of the internet, from my point of view, can be
| simply stated as "connection."
|
| Where do we go when we want to connect further and wider than
| our feet can take us? The internet. What is the point of
| connection? To share who we are through a wide variety of
| means: games, text, images, music, voice, etc.
|
| The internet as a protocol supports that endeavor, but the
| layers that were built on top of the internet started
| swallowing up human attention. Now there are a few large
| leaders who have built application layers on top of the web,
| and that's where people go for their connection. This very
| website is one of them.
|
| Recent developments with ActivityPub and mastodon are
| promising. Personally, I'd just like to find my way back to a
| universal protocol for connection. At the root of it, there's a
| need for infrastructure which will always cost money. I think
| that's the main hurdle that needs overcoming.
| mym1990 wrote:
| Not only has the content become fairly centralized, many of the
| sites that you might go to find things like...recipes, or guides,
| or direction on something...are absolutely _littered_ with ads.
| It is no trivial task to scroll through these metaphorical
| garbage cans looking for that one tidbit of information that will
| help you, mobile especially. And to some degree, I get it. The
| incentives that got is to today are all pointed towards an ad
| based world, so part of me just laments the feeling of seeing
| more of these kinds of blogs.
|
| /rant
| yard2010 wrote:
| Tip: ublock origin on PC, vivaldi browser on android. No more
| ads
| Moru wrote:
| And the few pages that stop working probably weren't good for
| your time management anyway.
| mym1990 wrote:
| You're missing the forest for the trees. I don't want to
| download a bunch of crap so that I can avoid seeing other
| crap. Eventually the providers will find a way around the
| crap I installed with more crap, you get the idea.
|
| It is the world we live in, dominated by advertising at every
| nook and cranny that is disturbing.
| cybrox wrote:
| In general, yes. But I've been using uBlock origin on my PC
| for years now and recently started using it on Firefox for
| Android as well (they support addons now) and I don't
| really recall any time where ads slipped through.
|
| Of course excessive advertising and counter measures are
| always a cat and mouse game but this is once instance where
| I can blissfully ignore it as a user very easily.
| Minor49er wrote:
| So you don't like seeing ads, but don't want to use freely-
| available tools that will remove them from websites?
| Digital ads are the easiest ads to remove from one's life
| pipeline_peak wrote:
| A lot of those recipe sites just love to start off with a 5
| paragraph essay before the actual recipe.
|
| Everything online reads like a magazine.
| chasd00 wrote:
| recipes are the worst, I've resorted to just printing them out
| on physical paper, stapling them, and keeping the good ones in
| a manilla folder. lol it works surprisingly well actually, that
| folder is a very fast MRU cache or in reverse order an LRU
| cache.
| cgearhart wrote:
| I have been feeling this quite acutely for several years now, but
| it does seem like it's been accelerating. In my head I've been
| blaming LLMs--appification was already driving content into
| silos, but the locks came out _quickly_ this past year as the
| silos realized they were giving away very valuable data for free.
| I guess the sad part for me is that the internet mostly feels
| like a waste of time at this point--everything is designed and
| optimized to maximize "engagement" (ie monopolizing your
| attention) and that's not well-aligned with being _useful_.
| Cookie banners, paywalls, spam--everywhere. Mobile sites are
| practically unusable--half page banner ad at the top, video ad
| auto playing underneath it, ad network drawer sliding up from the
| bottom, interstitial ads in the content itself, a popup over the
| page asking you to sign up for an account, a chat bot in the
| corner, and a "continue reading" fold mid page. It's just...not
| fun anymore.
| zilti wrote:
| I wonder what it will be like in a few years. How much worse
| can it get? Will the web be a desolate wasteland with a few
| social media pages people "flee" to, while the more tech savvy
| will start using alternative platforms again, like Gemini, IRC,
| etc.?
| cgearhart wrote:
| In the worst case I could see content platforms start
| competing on those terms and a resulting winner-take-all
| consolidation to the point that "the internet" becomes
| synonymous with WinnerPlatform. (This has already happened to
| some degree with things like government offices making
| official announcements exclusively on closed platforms like X
| or Facebook.) There will always be nerds and hackers who have
| small personal sites, but the internet would be falling short
| of its potential if, for example, you needed a Facebook
| account to participate in government.
| zilti wrote:
| A bit ironic that the very thing the web freed itself from
| already once (walled gardens from the likes of AOL) now
| comes back again much stronger.
| ProxCoques wrote:
| Yes. Although you can block a lot of stuff (I run a pi-hole and
| put my connection through it via a VPN when I'm on the road),
| the bigger issue is really the content itself is being warped
| by what you describe too. Take Threads, to which I've recently
| moved in preference to Xitter. It's quite clear that whether
| conscious or not, a large section of people on there are
| playing for followers, making stupid controversial statements
| to get attention because that's how things work now.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| You should set your browser to always open pages in Reader
| View. Especially on mobile. If needed, you can easily turn it
| off for specific pages. This blocks all crap and leaves you
| with the text and images only.
| cgearhart wrote:
| I will give this a try. Thanks!
| carlosjobim wrote:
| In iOS Safari you can then long-click the reader icon to
| jump out of reader mode on the current page.
|
| If you want to make it permanent for that domain, you click
| the Reader icon -> Web page settings -> Disable automatic
| reader view.
| nvm0n2 wrote:
| Cookie banners aren't designed to optimize engagement, they're
| forced on websites by the EU.
|
| Paywalls aren't designed to optimize engagement, they kill it!
| Paywalls slaughter almost all your traffic and kill social
| media virality dead, but they can still work out better than
| trying to fight ad blocking.
|
| Spam, well, most spam is short. They want to get your attention
| and bring you to their shop. It's not really about
| doomscrolling from there on.
|
| So if you're complaining about both ads and paywalls then
| really you just want content made by volunteers for free. But
| as Wikipedia has shown, that can work great for a short time
| until the normies get exhausted and move on, leaving behind the
| truly crazy fanatics to stay in charge. It's not necessarily
| better.
| bell-cot wrote:
| Obviously an imperfect analogy - but the article reminded me of
| an older acquaintance, describing how the world he lived in
| became so shriveled and monotonous, as he descended into
| alcoholism.
| danielovichdk wrote:
| I think you touch on something correct. It's not that the
| websites are gone. It's because the used to be readers has been
| caught in echo chambers and new trends and can't seem to
| understand that they are the ones who changed.
| jjgreen wrote:
| Beer is one way out ...
| isodev wrote:
| Apps themselves have undergone a similar transformation. It's OK
| to have an app for everything but instead today we sort of have a
| more common format: "login and we let you download the For You
| page in what looks like an app".
|
| For some reason, websites are also trying to be apps, instead of
| being websites and it feels like both are a side effect of of
| what the OP describes as the need for the few to maximise revenue
| on their content.
| miramba wrote:
| I believe that there are still a lot of interesting, non-
| commercial websites out there. I just can't find them anymore.
| SEO dominates literally every search I try. I also tried Bing,
| DuckDuckGo, you.com and many more - same result. I think a search
| engine that excludes every website with google analytics, ad
| networks and amazon affiliate links would be great. Anyone know
| of such a thing?
| wt__ wrote:
| Have you tried Kagi? It's subscription and doesn't really do
| what you suggest, but it's results are good, you can prioritise
| and block specific sites and they have a project called Kagi
| Small Web: https://blog.kagi.com/small-web
| gmiller123456 wrote:
| Been trying Kagi for a few months now. Sadly, I don't notice
| much difference from Google.
|
| For example, this past weekend I tried to work on learning
| some WebGPU stuff. The search results were filled with WebGL,
| WGPU, Three.js, Babylon, etc. stuff. The page might have
| contained "WebGPU" in a sidebar or something similar, but
| weren't about WebGPU at all.
| azornathogron wrote:
| You may want https://search.marginalia.nu/
|
| It gets mentioned here on HN quite a lot.
| prox wrote:
| What a magnificent search engine, love it. It brings back
| those wandering days of link clicking reading about people
| and their passions. No stupid "and here's where you sign up"
| and annoying things like that.
| ghosty141 wrote:
| Really missing a way to sort by recency, that would make it
| far more useful for me.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Easy enough. Added a toggle for showing results that are <2
| years old. May need to tune it a bit I guess (maybe 5
| years).
|
| Dunno if it's actually useful, we'll have to see. I'm not
| one to shy away from feature creep though, and a lot of
| people are requesting these sorts of things...
| hgs3 wrote:
| Wow. I see this as proof web surfing died because the Big
| Search Engines prefer to promote commercial entities over
| individual interests.
| pixl97 wrote:
| I can only imagine of Google faced the full firehose of
| their search traffic at your blog that most people would go
| broke paying their web bill.
|
| This said, I do think the bigger issue is we have pretty
| much 2 big search engines so there is no real competition
| in the market. And that those search engines are also ad
| companies and have a vested interest in showing ads.
| over_bridge wrote:
| I wonder if Google could build some custom variants of
| their search. That way they can use their underlying tech
| but reskin it to bias towards different things - eg favor
| local results, or scholarly, short form, or
| video/audio/text. Apply a lens or filter to results so we
| aren't all being served the same bland concoction of
| links.
|
| Sure AI could do this on a personal level but communities
| are built around shared experiences so we might see some
| major labelled variants emerge that shape new
| communities.
|
| Each could even have an internal product owner trying to
| beat the others. Its a simulation of competition which
| might drive some innovation from Google once again
| (assuming no real competition is breaking through that
| market domination anytime soon)
|
| The internet is the way it is largely because of Google's
| algorithm and people shaping their content to appease it.
| If they allowed several to exist, we could have several
| internets also existing without the need for a new walled
| garden.
| pegasus wrote:
| search.marginalia.nu is one option. Apparently Kagi also has a
| "Small Web" option. Check out this thread:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38821248
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| Have you heard of https://www.marginalia.nu/ in general, and
| especially the https://search.marginalia.nu/ from there?
| pkdpic wrote:
| That's an excellent idea, sounds like it might be possible
| (ironically) as a chrome extension? Someone should make it but
| more importantly someone should come up with a good name for it
| ;)
| yreg wrote:
| > I believe that there are still a lot of interesting, non-
| commercial websites out there.
|
| Surely there are more than ever. Just difficult to find, as you
| say.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Yeah, I think it's noteworthy that the times in history we
| view as high water marks in terms of personal websites are
| also the times in history we had really good
| aggregators/navigation tools for personal websites. I think
| in absolute terms we aren't significantly worse off than in
| the '90s when "surfing the web" was so big there were printed
| magazines dedicated to the passtime.
|
| On the flip side, it doesn't matter how many great websites
| there are if you can't find them. If we want a thriving
| ecosystem of smaller and more personal websites, then it
| needs discovery tools.
|
| My efforts with Marginalia Search, wiby.me, ooh.directory,
| neocities; it's all a decent start, but I think we can do
| even better.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| You're (maybe) inadvertently on to something there,
|
| > there were printed magazines dedicated to the passtime.
| 1. (1) pastime, interest, pursuit -- (a diversion that
| occupies one's time and thoughts (usually
| pleasantly);
|
| I think what some of us are nostalgic for is when the "Web"
| was a way to pass the time. For many it was a cultural
| curiosity first, then an entertainment source. At some
| point it pivoted to being work. It turned into filing
| taxes, shopping for insurance, and a place for maintaining
| a "professional profile". From what I see of social media a
| great many people make it into "work" of a kind. In this
| metamorphosis we somehow made the silly web serious and the
| serious web silly. Now nobody knows the difference and so
| the headspace of "passtime" has itself sort of vanished.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| https://wilby.me/ does that. But back in the day all the
| "interesting, non-commercial websites" would be listed in a
| curated web directory arranged by subject, and we're still
| missing that. There is an emerging practice of niche subject-
| specific "awesome-lists" but these are no substitute.
| acegopher wrote:
| Are you sure that's the correct URL? That site is a near-
| default Wordpress site with a single Hello World post from
| 2018.
| lurking15 wrote:
| I believe he means to say https://wiby.me
| blackhaj7 wrote:
| Agreed that SEO garbage has made it very hard to find good
| websites
| HeckFeck wrote:
| They're still there. When I stumble upon them I take note and
| gather them into this web gallery. Well Made Web, the old town
| of the Internet:
|
| https://wmw.thran.uk
| dikei wrote:
| Isn't this how we classify web "generation"?
|
| * Web 1.0: independent websites, self-maintained, hard
|
| * Web 2.0: hosted platforms like blogs and social networks, easy,
| but rely on providers
|
| * Web 3.0: promise to free users from the platform providers but
| are mostly crypto scam currently.
| bdcravens wrote:
| Web 3 as you described it never existed.
|
| I think Web 3 is more the TikTok and other mass content tools.
| Still dependent on their parties, but it's shifted to more
| access to rich content and more access, rather than the curated
| pinhole view of "posts", especially when it comes to live
| feeds.
| mcv wrote:
| I would really like web3 to go back to distributed networks.
| Fediverse and all that. I guess cryptocurrencies fit in there
| too; I guess web3 would have its light and dark side. But
| decentralisation would be a nice theme.
|
| TikTok isn't really fundamentally different from the stuff we
| consider web2, is it?
|
| (I actually think imposing these artificial "generations" on
| web evolution is silly, but if we're going to do it, I'd
| prefer to use it to steer it towards something positive.)
| ok_dad wrote:
| I think Web N isn't about the actual tech being used, it's
| about the way the tech is being used and how it interacts
| with the real world and our society. Web 1 was HTML
| informational web sites, maybe some chat rooms and games
| here and there but not much affect on the real world. Web 2
| was/is the "web app" where you can transact various
| business online, and group into communities and stuff and
| which is well integrated into our lives. Web 3, I think, is
| currently being formed and I have no idea what it is, but
| whomever can figure that out will be the first nrillionaire
| or whatever. The tech itself is just all the same if/else
| statements in a different order.
| maigret wrote:
| It's interesting because, at the time of Web 2, it was
| not only the "social media" proposition the only one, but
| also AJAX as well as more Javascript-driven websites
| (with more interaction potential). It was also the time
| of widgets and iframes, where all kinds of interesting
| 3rd party integrations appeared, like the bookmarklets
| (remember Yahoo Pipes, netvibes, RSS?). Unfortunately,
| the seed of advertising pretty much killed the rest over
| time.
| mcv wrote:
| This exactly. And getting content from third party sites
| dynamically. The classic example was having a Google Maps
| thing on your site where you'd show your, or even yet
| another party's data on a map. There was increasing
| amounts of data becoming available, apis opening up,
| governments releasing data sets. Combining all of that
| into something interesting, that was the real promise of
| web 2.0.
|
| And then everybody started using that to add trackers and
| push ads.
| bvvg wrote:
| The advent of the smartphone and touchscreen is
| essentially the defining characteristic of Web 2.0 and we
| haven't really approached Web 3.0+ in any meaningful way,
| in my experience. However, I am not a computer
| architecture/hw guru, yet I still expect the future to be
| pleasantly surprising despite this, erm, rather
| unnecessarily difficult time.
| Stranger43 wrote:
| The big hurdle is that for some reason people think that
| video content cannot be decentralized and that building
| off-platform brands tend to be a lot harder then playing
| the algorithm for most professional creators.
|
| Web3 as a brand is probably dead having been tarnished by
| association with the cryptoscam community, but there is
| some hint that the zeitgeists is for both creators and
| consumers wanting a more direct relationship that can only
| really come via more decentralization of control.
| andrepd wrote:
| >TikTok isn't really fundamentally different from the stuff
| we consider web2, is it?
|
| _Yes_ , it is. It's only superficially similar
| (technically "user-generated" content). It's a qualitative
| difference. The fundamental difference is human-curated vs
| algorithmic. You go on youtube or instagram or tiktok and
| all you see is what the algorithm pushes: usually the
| shittiest most junk content imaginable. It's a qualitative
| difference from having your blogs and following links and
| etc.
|
| The other main difference is of course that it's now all
| commercial. Everything everywhere, be it a google search
| for "best blender" to a youtube frontpage, is trying to
| sell you stuff or to make you click on ads. It contaminates
| everything.
| mcv wrote:
| But what about this is TikTok specific? Google and
| Facebook have done the exact same thing for ages.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Isn't TikTok solidly Web 2? It does not do any revolutionary.
| Maybe 2.3, but certainly it is pretty much same as for
| example Youtube. Just done bit differently.
| nairboon wrote:
| These version numbers are for marketing. None of them are
| revolutionary, only the web itself is.
| tluyben2 wrote:
| There was a difference between hosted blogs, forums etc
| before and the new 'social-fied' ones we have now. It's not
| revolutionary, but it's a big enough change from 2 when
| that started to warrant some different tag imho. Blogs on
| blogger etc you still discovered yourself, now it's just an
| endless stream of garbage I don't care about (even though
| 'it knows me') with ads 'sprinkled' (hosed) in there on
| most platforms.
| hnbad wrote:
| I'm not sure how people forgot this but Web 2.0 wasn't
| about Facebook etc as they are today. It was about content
| creation and blogging and social media was just a way to
| blog and create content.
|
| Web 2.0 was all about networks and sharing. Heck, one of
| the biggest ideas at the time was "mashups". If-This-Then-
| That (IFTTT) got its start there. Yahoo! Pipes was a thing.
| Websites would freely provide RSS feeds you could not only
| subscribe to in your Reader but also use to create your own
| news feed in your dashboard that also showed you the latest
| issue of your favorite webcomic, the weather forecast and a
| stock ticker. Everything was beta. Most of it was free.
| Much of it could be fed into other things. Scraping was for
| hobbyists, not startups.
|
| If anything, the walled gardens were Web 2.1. When
| companies realized that keeping data inside the platform
| rather than sharing it makes it easier to monetize.
|
| I think if we're going with version numbers it also makes
| sense to describe the dot-com bubble as Web 1.0 as the
| biggest change that led to it was the massive increase in
| the number of people with Internet access making the Web
| commercially interesting (or viable). What some HNers
| fondly remember as the old Web is either the late pre-Web
| 2.0 days with webrings, Geocities and personal hobby
| websites (the latter eventually being supplanted by blogs,
| tumblr, livejournal and so on) or the pre-Web 1.0 days when
| most websites were hyperspecific hobby projects written by
| technophiles and hosted on Internet connected potatos or
| their university's web server.
| bvvg wrote:
| Yes, but I'd describe it more like Web 2.5 is basically the
| gross-weaponization of gossip as a glorified get-rich-quick
| pyramid scheme. There is little-to-no reason for this mode of
| thinking in 2024 and beyond, if we are to realize anything
| resembling actual human potential.
|
| Until a more equitable society exists, we will likely not see
| a legitimate Web 3.0+, in my estimation.
|
| Full disclosure: I'm a cusper Xillenial who thinks Elon Musk
| is an idiot and hopes he can find some actual value somewhere
| hidden in the depths of his colossal failures, plural.
| mrkramer wrote:
| I think Web 3 is already here; it is your browser that has
| millions of LOC and that is more powerful then ever before.
| There are hundreds and thousands of useful browser extensions
| and I think we should build around that ecosystem. Mix
| powerful web browser and its extension ecosystem with DeFi
| and other decentralized solutions and we should get some
| interesting use cases and apps.
| jl6 wrote:
| No, Web 2.0 was coined mostly off the back of XMLHttpRequest
| which enabled reloadless interactivity.
|
| Then Web 3.0 was coined by a bunch of crypto grifters who tried
| to inherit credibility by extending the x.0 numbering scheme.
|
| It's all rather meaningless. See also: Industry 4.0.
| nairboon wrote:
| Someday there will be a Web 4.0, similar to some of the visions
| of Web 3.0, but without the money stuff, instead a true p2p
| web.
| krapp wrote:
| Web 4.0, since this nomenclature is nothing but hype and BS
| anyway, will be the web completely ruined by AI content. And
| unfortunately that web is already here.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Web 3.0: back to independent websites but adding federation and
| detailed, subject-specific semantic markup (as provided by the
| schema.org standards, supported by the major search engines) to
| aid in discoverability.
| andrepd wrote:
| There is a distinct difference between Web 2.0 (think wikis,
| blogs) and the social-media paradigm that followed since
| ~2012-13.
| cpburns2009 wrote:
| No one seems to remember the original web 3.0 was the semantic
| web from almost 20 years ago. It in part enabled the news feed
| aggregation of modern social media.
| asicsp wrote:
| See also: "Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36575081 _(1014 points | 6
| months ago | 1960 comments)_
| splitbrain wrote:
| Also https://indieblog.page/ to randomly jump to a post from
| any of the mentioned personal blogs from that post plus many
| many more. (close to 3500 personal blogs)
| carrozo wrote:
| This could be a nice monthly HN post like the who's hiring /
| who wants to be hired ones.
|
| "What blogs did you post to in the last month?"
| pelagicAustral wrote:
| From the thread: https://dm.hn still going
| bdcravens wrote:
| I don't see the TikTokization of the world as necessarily bad -
| it creates a world of fast publishing with first-class tools, no
| nerd gatekeeping required.
| Stranger43 wrote:
| Exept of cause that it creates a bunch of giant for profit
| gatekeepers manipulating the content stream for maximum
| profit(for the gatekeeper).
| mym1990 wrote:
| It also creates a world of nearly unlimited consumption, and
| the majority of the userbase is on the consumption side, not
| the publishing side.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| The problem with having a platform like that is the obvious
| incentive for rent-seeking.
|
| In the short term user interests align with platform interests
| because this creates a rapidly growing user base, but in the
| long term it's contrary to the platform's best interest to act
| in the users' best interest, as a large number of users alone
| does not translate to profit, so what happens is what's
| happened to Facebook, Reddit, Twitter; basically any mature
| social media platform still around. They turn themselves to
| poison.
| keiferski wrote:
| I share the author's feelings on the old web, but I think this
| misses a fundamental point about younger people: they don't
| really _read_ as the default anymore, in the sense of reading
| longform blog posts /articles/newspapers. You could blame this on
| the impatience of youth, but I think it's actually more of a
| fundamental shift of media formats. Websites-as-default have gone
| away because browsing the web (i.e. _reading_ stuff on websites)
| has largely gone away for most people.
|
| It's easy to forget that reading text is in no way "natural" to
| the human experience, it's just an old, reliable technology.
| Video, which functions as a proxy to in-person presence and
| speech, is dramatically more appealing to the average person than
| the abstract symbol system that is writing and reading.
|
| It would not surprise me at all if a century from now, video is
| the default format, with text-first things like transcripts
| redesigned to minimize the downsides of video and replicate the
| benefits of text.
| ImHereToVote wrote:
| Video? How quaint. Why not simply translate the latent
| representation of concepts.
| keiferski wrote:
| I'm not really sure what you're trying to communicate here,
| but: the average person likes watching/listening to other
| people talk. Maybe the uber cyborg AI gods of the future will
| communicate directly with mental models, but for everyone
| else, the only thing that is better than video is probably a
| hologram, which is basically the same thing taken to the next
| level.
| ImHereToVote wrote:
| Just commenting on your timelines. They are a bit on the
| short side considering the rapid pace of technology.
| klibertp wrote:
| As sad as it is, video is already a preferred and main
| content format for most people. It always was. The closer
| to reality, the more engaging [EDIT: and easier to digest]
| the content. We had some text renaissance due to technical
| limitations, but that's over already. Beginner programmers
| now routinely shun written content in favor of video - how
| contradictory is that? But that's how it is right now.
|
| Writing as a mode of communication requires effort on both
| the creator and consumer sides. That effort has many
| positive side effects, which is why some people still favor
| it [EDIT: and will favor it for a long time in the future,
| until something genuinely better shows up]. The problem is
| that, no matter what, effort is still effort, and people
| generally don't like to exhaust themselves. Gyms would be
| chock-full, and we'd have no obesity problem if it weren't
| so.
|
| Your "century from now" estimate is _extremely_ optimistic,
| to the point of being completely divorced from reality. If
| I had to bet, I 'd say we will lose most textual content
| from mainstream consumption in the next 5 to 10 years. My
| guess is that writing will become the equivalent of today's
| HTML and JavaScript: a source code to be interpreted by the
| machine to produce a visual representation that people will
| consume. It'll disappear into the background and will only
| be touched by professionals.
| ImHereToVote wrote:
| I wouldn't be surprised if we just had a AI "assistant",
| or "friend". That would explain things for you if they
| need explaining. Like who to vote for, or what brand of
| stimulant to buy. The "friend" that vibes with you best
| would be the one you trust the most. Assuming
| corporations would be interested to cater to a bunch of
| unemployables that is.
| pjc50 wrote:
| I'm slightly alarmed by this, not just because of the decline
| of literacy and the slower speed of transmission, but the
| stronger charisma effects through voice seem to me to be a
| driver of problems. That seems to be why there are so many
| terrible influencer cult leaders.
| keiferski wrote:
| Part of me has the same concerns, as I love books and think
| reading is critical. However, I also realize that reading and
| books are a technology that has developed through history,
| like anything else, and that a yet-unseen format of the
| future (that incorporates video, text, audio, etc.) may be
| more effective than reading. I don't actually think reading
| is a _great_ way of communication, it 's more just
| evolutionarily fit compared to speech.
| mym1990 wrote:
| " I don't actually think reading is a great way of
| communication, it's more just evolutionarily fit compared
| to speech."
|
| This is a very baffling thing to say. Its like saying "I
| don't think fish gills are an effective form of breathing
| for fish, but it just happened to evolve like that."
| Reading and writing is an _amazing_ way to communicate
| things that need to span time. Street signs, postcards,
| books, literally everything around you that is man made
| likely has some form of writing on it.
|
| Reading/writing obviously has limitations...like it is
| difficult to interpret tone in many of these HN
| comments...but that is hardly a nail in the coffin of the
| form of communication.
| keiferski wrote:
| My point is that the average person doesn't actually
| _like_ to read and would rather watch a video or listen
| to audio. The number of hours spent scrolling TikTok or
| YouTube absolutely dwarfs the number of hours people
| spend reading books for pleasure. This is...basic
| sociological knowledge about contemporary society and
| really not a controversial thing to say at all. People
| read much less today than they used to.
|
| Writing is more durable than it is desirable, and as its
| durability is matched by video and digital devices, I
| expect its presence to lessen.
| mym1990 wrote:
| Why the strawman? Your claim of the average person not
| liking to read and what we are actually discussing of
| _reading /writing being a good form of communication_ are
| two different things.
|
| Plenty of people like lots of bad things because we have
| monkey brains, stop thinking that just because a group
| likes something, it is good. I watch the behavior day in
| and day out...people watch HOURS of content per day, and
| at the end they have synthesized almost none of it. A
| majority of social video and audio is just a way for
| people to entertain themselves and a buffer against being
| alone with their thoughts. I wholeheartedly agree that
| audio and video can be great learning and communication
| tools. To say that is what is happening on a majority of
| social media is extremely misguided.
| keiferski wrote:
| I am describing what I see as a societal shift and
| commenting on it. You are making this (and your other
| comment) into some moralistic activist argument, which is
| entirely missing the point and frankly just
| uninteresting. As I said, it's not about what is better,
| it's what ends up being used by people that drives
| culture.
|
| Adding to that: the critique of writing has a long
| history going back all the way to Plato. This is not a
| new topic.
| mym1990 wrote:
| What is uninteresting is your weak spine in succumbing to
| "societal inertia", without considering what is possibly
| good or bad, just what is. You clearly don't know what
| you're describing because you're just flip flopping
| between 2 things. Just read your comments back in a
| couple of hours and you'll understand.
|
| Like I actually can't understand how your argument is:
| "people are watching more videos, therefore reading is
| bad". Did you even think that through?
| keiferski wrote:
| You really don't seem to understand that one can observe
| things separately from passing judgment on them. It's a
| basic principle of science. I don't know why you seem to
| have such a hard time understanding this, but judging by
| your hostile remarks in every comment, you just want to
| argue.
|
| And in case this isn't already crystal clear (and
| apparently it isn't for you): I like books. I like
| reading. I have studied the history of the printing press
| and the book much, much more you have, I assure you. I
| find the transition of technology fascinating and think
| the internet and video is a similar revolution to the
| printing press. _That_ is what my comment is about, not
| your puerile attempt to make me seem like I don't like
| reading.
| pomian wrote:
| And here we are, the HN consumers, reading(!) the
| comments. No videos or pictures. I mention this to
| support your comment, that there are people who like to
| read, and learn from reading, but it requires more time,
| more involvement, and more imagination. We are a
| minority? Few have that luxury, and inclination - it
| turns out, so the massive onslaught of easy,
| entertainment. One music video can have 500 million
| viewers. I don't know how many viewers of HN there are,
| but, I doubt it's a million. It is interesting to see
| where (and how) the information flow goes from here on.
| keiferski wrote:
| For sure, I love HN and love reading. But if we're honest
| here, it's a niche thing. A random TikTok video gets more
| views than a link that's on the HN front page all day.
| danielovichdk wrote:
| I don't know where you get that idea from. But humans has been
| reading for thousands of years. And on a cognitive level
| reading is superior to video or sound. Tons of evidence has
| been based on that premise.
|
| It has nothing to do with young people and a sudden change in
| human patience. If your young ones are impatient of they read
| something is disturbing them, but it's definitely not human
| evolution.
| keiferski wrote:
| Reading as a mass culture phenomenon is absolutely not
| thousands of years old and mass literacy didn't exist in a
| lot of places a mere century or two ago. Even today, you'd be
| surprised at how most people have _very_ basic literacy
| skills.
|
| _And on a cognitive level reading is superior to video or
| sound._
|
| I'm pretty skeptical of that claim, but even if it's true, it
| doesn't really matter if reading is _better_ than watching a
| video if people _prefer_ to watch videos.
|
| I also specifically said it's _not_ an issue of impatience,
| but rather a fundamental shifting of media formats.
| mym1990 wrote:
| Why would it not matter? You think just because a mass
| group prefers one thing, it will have good outcomes?
| Will/are your kids glued to screens 24/7 because others
| _prefer_ it? Seems like you may be a lost cause already.
|
| And maybe mass literacy hasn't been around for millenia,
| but written form of communication and story telling
| certainly has.
| keiferski wrote:
| It wouldn't matter because society is already orienting
| itself towards a screen-first world. Parents that force
| their kids to read books and not use screens are almost
| certainly a minority.
|
| _Seems like you may be a lost cause already._
|
| Not sure what this is supposed to mean. I'm describing
| what I perceive to be a societal shift, not my personal
| thoughts on whether I think it's good or bad.
| mym1990 wrote:
| It literally matters that people fight that urge. It
| almost never takes a majority to turn the tide of a
| movement(and I am not advocating for any extremes). There
| needs to be some kind of balance. If a parent is
| "forcing" their child to read books or to be curious
| about the world, something has gone awry earlier on. I
| know plenty of parent who limit screen time, let their
| kids play outside, and do so themselves, but that is all
| anecdotal and does not represent the average experience.
|
| I guess it "wouldn't matter" if in 50 years everyone is
| just a mush brain on their couch scrolling TikTok getting
| fed through a brain tube. Yeah...hard to see how it
| "wouldn't matter".
| Ekaros wrote:
| I think it is not that people don't like reading.
|
| It is just that video content generate so much more
| monetization. At least compared to work done. Thus most
| relevant content is generated as video instead of text. And
| those generating text are struggling with revenue sources.
| keiferski wrote:
| I think if you asked people under the age of thirty what they
| prefer, 90% are going to choose video over books.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Maybe not books. But let's ask would they prefer video to
| check ingredients in a recipe or a textual article? Or
| maybe video instead of wikipedia page to verify some
| facts...
|
| Similar things go to many things that would clearly be
| superior as text, but there simply isn't that much money in
| something user will quickly skim over. Instead of forced
| pre-roll adds and sponsorships.
| keiferski wrote:
| Definitely I think younger people prefer TikTok cooking
| videos to bloated recipe websites.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| If you're a new creator and don't have family with good media
| connections, then YouTube is pretty much the only way that
| you can actually get paid for what you make. Regardless of
| medium.
|
| Anybody tell me what are the other realistic options?
| ben_w wrote:
| > they don't really read as the default anymore, in the sense
| of reading longform blog posts/articles/newspapers
|
| Did they ever? I grew up with newspapers, but adults back then
| were saying much the same then just with books as their example
| of "things kids don't read these days"[0], to the extent that
| my mum decided she ought to bribe me to read more[1]. But I
| also remember reading some claim that most people back then
| were reading just the headlines of newspapers, and if they were
| particularly engaged by that, perhaps the first/last paragraphs
| too.
|
| [0] right before Harry Potter came out.
|
| [1] I can't remember exactly how much any more, but I got at
| least a few week's worth of pocket money from the New
| Testament.
| keiferski wrote:
| Yes, they did, even if they were reading pulp novels and not
| classic literature.
| ben_w wrote:
| I am the "they" in the case of last generations' "kids
| these days".
|
| What "kids these days" do and don't do has always been a
| subject of parental concern, but the reality is that people
| aren't a homogenous group, and being an adult makes you
| more aware of people who grow up differently than you did.
|
| Just as my mum was concerned about my reading habits (she
| probably saw a headline about it), so too are you concerned
| about the current generation's.
|
| My generation was all over the place, and so is today's.
| The top readers of my generation read widely, most adults
| when I was a kid didn't read more than the headline; The
| top readers of the current generation read widely, most
| adults today don't read more than the headline... and even
| here, we get comments where people clearly comment without
| having read the link.
| keiferski wrote:
| There is pretty reliable data that says people read less
| today. It's not just the "parents complain about their
| kids" fallacy.
| ben_w wrote:
| P != NP.
|
| Link and everyone can look, but I sure 'ain't gonna
| search for this "reliable data" and then try to figure
| out if what I find is or isn't, in fact, reliable.
| aredox wrote:
| See the same sentiment from Marginalia :
| https://www.marginalia.nu/log/79-ikea-offramp/
| cpeterso wrote:
| Great analogy from the post:
|
| > There is an episode of Star Trek where a character is for
| plot reasons trapped in a shrinking parallel universe. As time
| passes, people she knows one by one just vanish and she is the
| only one who seems to notice. Eventually it gets to an absurd
| point. She asks if it really makes sense if a ship made for a
| thousand people would have a crew of a few people, and everyone
| just sort of like shrugs and looks at her like she's crazy.
| That's basically what the last decade of the Internet. It feels
| like it's shrinking. Like parts of it are vanishing.
| Stranger43 wrote:
| It feels like the web grew up into an bitter old fart who takes
| everything way to seriously.
|
| What's missing is the culture of "anonymity" where everyone was
| pretty much just a screen name and people did not give that much
| care to their long term reputations and the fall from that more
| or less started with facebooks real name policy, or rather when
| facebook stopped being an glorified phonebook and started being
| an content platform.
|
| That culture of "pseudoanonymous amateurs" gave rise to an
| atmosphere of fun that seems to be entirely missing today as
| everyone is too focused on the hustle of monetization and
| avoiding controversy to just do silly things.
|
| Add to that that for some reason every large enterprise
| organization seems to have forgotten how to actually manage and
| use their own websites preferring instead to blast out using the
| new "everything for everyone" platforms.
| yreg wrote:
| > What's missing is the culture of "anonymity" where everyone
| was pretty much just a screen name
|
| It seems that the society at large wants this. 4chan has a
| horrible reputation in the outside world. Reddit's reputation
| is improving hand in hand with the tightening of their content
| policies.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Their reputations are mediated by news sources, though. It's
| hard to know what's real and what's the result of 500 news
| articles gradually shading in emotional responses over these
| websites most people know little about.
| bheadmaster wrote:
| > 4chan has a horrible reputation in the outside world.
|
| That's because without any particular individuals to point
| the finger to, they just blame the monolith of "anonymous
| individuals".
|
| People have always feared the unknown, and the obvious coping
| mechanism is to aggregate it into some tangible form, whether
| it's the Boogeyman, Baba Yaga, the Devil, Anonymous, or any
| other villain, to be used as a scapegoat.
| krapp wrote:
| Nah. 4chan's reputation is entirely deserved.
| bheadmaster wrote:
| Nah. 4chan's reputation is entirely undeserved.
|
| See? I can also make claims without any arguments
| whatsoever.
| krapp wrote:
| Yes, that's all you've been doing.
|
| But 4chan wears its infamy on its sleeve with pride
| (usually white pride.) The Alfred E. Neuman shtick of
| disaffected bemusement was stale even when Mad was
| published on dead trees.
|
| But go ahead and take the last laugh. You're being
| neither clever nor insightful here.
| bheadmaster wrote:
| > Yes, that's all you've been doing.
|
| No, in the comment you've originally replied to I have
| clearly stated a possible explanation of why 4chan has a
| bad reputation. Please refrain from pointless "no u"
| comments, and attack my arguments instead.
|
| > But 4chan wears its infamy on its sleeve with pride
| (usually white pride.)
|
| 4chan is not an entity onto itself - it is composed of
| many individuals, that was the whole point of my post.
| But because you don't know the identity of those
| individuals, you just consider them a monolith and put
| collective blame onto them.
|
| Additionaly, the official rule 3. of 4chan states:
| You will not post any of the following outside /b/:
| [...] b. Racism [...]
|
| > But go ahead and take the last laugh. You're being
| neither clever nor insightful here.
|
| Please refrain from personal insults. See
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html:
| When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of
| calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can
| be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
| pjc50 wrote:
| But you can still post racism inside /b/?
| bheadmaster wrote:
| Yes.
|
| On /b/, all legal (in the US) content is permitted. It
| serves as a sort of containment board for the degenerates
| to shitpost, leaving other boards alone. Nobody takes any
| content from /b/ seriously, and the nickname for /b/
| users is "/b/tards".
|
| In fact, /b/ is just a small part of 4chan, one that most
| users actually loathe, but which seems to be the most
| highlighted in public consciousness. Probably due to its
| complete lack of censorship, which seems to be frowned
| upon in this day and age.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| > Nobody takes any content from /b/ seriously.
|
| That's a bold claim. It requires a single counter-example
| to disprove. I take it seriously, so your statement is
| empirically wrong. Please retract it.
| bheadmaster wrote:
| You are technically correct if we take the literal
| interpretation of my words, however, the literal
| interpretation is not the intended one. The intended
| interpretation is that _no reasonable person takes /b/
| seriously_.
|
| Perhaps you have some kind of impairment that prevents
| you from understanding subtleties of informal speech, but
| I think it's more likely you're just taking a piss.
|
| > I take it seriously
|
| Then you should check out the text under the title on /b/
| :) The stories and information posted
| here are artistic works of fiction and falsehood.
| Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| Oh, you took me literally too! So weird!
|
| What evidence would it take to change your mind?
| bheadmaster wrote:
| I find your manner of discussion obnoxious, so I will
| refrain from replying to you anymore.
|
| EDIT: you changed your reply to make it less obnoxious,
| but I won't come back to this discussion regardless.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| That's funny. I'll be here still waiting on hearing which
| evidence will change your mind. :)
| theshackleford wrote:
| Nobody intelligent. Where you fall on that spectrum is
| your problem.
| shuntress wrote:
| > 4chan is not an entity onto itself - it is composed of
| many individuals
|
| It, like every other community, has an aggregate identity
| built from the contributions of the individuals within
| the community.
|
| > Additionaly, the official rule 3. of 4chan states
| [racism is only allowed in /b/]
|
| If you honestly believe that /b/ is the only place on
| 4chan where you will find racist sentiment you need to
| have your head examined.
| trealira wrote:
| On the rest of 4chan outside of /b/, you'll find lots of
| racist comments. Particularly on /pol/, but there are
| plenty even ignoring that board. You can report
| particular posts for breaking the "racism outside of /b/"
| rule, but it's very hit-or-miss whether the rule is
| enforced.
| 98789992165 wrote:
| >user: krapp
|
| >created: August 16, 2012
|
| >karma: 16769
|
| Dude, you need to take a hard look at yourself. Looking
| at your last comments, it seems that you've been drinking
| your own kool-aid and truly believe you have the
| objective truth about everything. It's either that or
| you're a keyboard warrior in desperate need for an ego
| boost.
| temporarara wrote:
| If all you know about 4chan is /b/ and /pol/ then your
| opinion is valid, but there are lots of other boards
| there. In any case I find it useful to see at times what
| the most opinionated people are really thinking when
| there are no filters and rules to silence them. Like
| Isaac Asimov said: "Any book worth banning is a book
| worth reading." And at times "the worst kind of people"
| there are spot on in their obsessions. I 100% agree with
| them that child and human trafficking is a big issue in
| this world and some of the most powerful people are
| definitely involved.
| magicalist wrote:
| > _what the most opinionated people are really thinking
| when there are no filters and rules to silence them_
|
| I'm not sure what "most opinionated" would mean or how'd
| you determine relative levels, but I would bet whatever
| metric you chose wouldn't find the most opinionated
| people on 4chan. Also just because people say things
| online doesn't mean they actually hold that opinion.
|
| > _I 100% agree with them that child and human
| trafficking is a big issue in this world and some of the
| most powerful people are definitely involved_
|
| Oh, ok, you weren't actually responding to the parent
| comment at all.
| krapp wrote:
| The thing is, everyone already knew that child and human
| trafficking is a big issue in this world. No one needed
| to wade through the cesspool to find that out. But 4chan
| doesn't actually give a damn about the kids. They got
| obsessed with phantom sex cults under pizzerias and
| decoding gematria in emails because they wanted to
| undermine Hillary Clinton's election and because they got
| completely washed by actual non-ironic nazis who believe
| all "leftists" in power (IE the Democratic Party) are
| pedophiles because they equate LGBT with pedophilia and,
| by extension, Democratic support for the former with a
| likely predilection for the other.
|
| And then they came up with QAnon, not out of any sincere
| concern for "the children," but just as a shitpost that
| took off because it was too on the nose, and now
| legitimate efforts to curb child abuse are being
| hamstrung by this insane obsession they've bred into the
| zeitgeist to see trans people as "groomers" and secret
| pedo conspiracies everywhere.
|
| And yet, even though they'll gladly take credit for it,
| none of them saw Epstein coming. Sure, one anon posted
| about Epstein's death before it hit the news. That's
| about all they can legitimately take credit for, but
| overall they've done more harm than good.
| bufio wrote:
| Which variety of wojak spam do you find most insightful?
| theshackleford wrote:
| > You're being neither clever nor insightful here.
|
| If only you'd considered this yourself before posting.
| cloverich wrote:
| I think communities attract types of folks unless they
| become uber popular (like reddit) to the point they can
| attract everyone. 4chan was interesting when I found it,
| but I quickly found it became mostly toilet humor at its
| best, and was often (i.e. every time I opened it) full of
| racism and sexism. It was a safe place for immature folks
| to shout whatever they wanted and not care who it affected
| -- though of course anyone affected likely ditched the
| cesspool anyways. Yet, as I watched one of my friends
| continue to use it, I don't think it was pure coincidence
| that their own verbiage became increasingly vulgar and
| desensitized. As some of my friends matured as they grew
| up, I found he went the opposite direction (at least in
| online messaging).
| bheadmaster wrote:
| > It was a safe place for immature folks to shout
| whatever they wanted and not care who it affected
|
| It is sad that the popularity of internet has reached
| such proportions that people are no longer responsible
| for _what they read by their own choice_ , but rather
| people seem to be responsible for _what they write_ ,
| regardless of the fact that anyone can choose not to read
| it.
|
| Internet posts are just text, yet people act as if we're
| forcing others to read what we write. Imagine if writing
| books that make other people feel bad was banned - what a
| culture would that be.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| "Internet posts are just text, yet people act as if we're
| forcing others to read what we write. Imagine if writing
| books that make other people feel bad was banned - what a
| culture would that be."
|
| Between death threats and insults directed at real people
| - and a fictionary book, there is usually a difference,
| even though books can be bad as well, if they are
| directed against certain people (e.g. Mein Kampf).
| Stranger43 wrote:
| But those are platforms, for some reason this was not seen as
| a major problem back when we had websites and rss feeds
| rather then people sharing spaces on a single platform.
|
| There was always an underground of filth(even in the pre-
| internet days) but unless you sought it out you werent
| actually exposed to it back in the pre-platform days.
|
| It could be that the platformization is a consequence of
| people wanting censorship and handing over the curation power
| to large commercial entities lets people have that to an
| large enough degree. But it also leeds to a kind of
| blandification of content as everything have to fit into the
| model dictated by the platform taking away some venues of
| creativity(ie no crazy color schemes etc).
| mrkramer wrote:
| >It could be that the platformization is a consequence of
| people wanting censorship and handing over the curation
| power to large commercial entities lets people have that to
| an large enough degree. But it also leeds to a kind of
| blandification of content as everything have to fit into
| the model dictated by the platform taking away some venues
| of creativity(ie no crazy color schemes etc).
|
| This is so true; on every internet forum or community,
| there are different moderators, rules and values for the
| community and on the Facebook for example there is only
| Facebook and its TOS. You are in the mercy of the Facebook
| when it comes to the content moderation and setting rules
| and values for the community.
| aethertron wrote:
| Facebook has user-run groups, so there are at least 3
| levels of moderation/rules there: 1.
| National law 2. Facebook TOS 3. Group rules
|
| But the legislative power, to to speak, at the group
| level is quite weak. They can further restrict according
| to some values, which is fine as it is. Freedom of
| association. They can't control the UI.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >for some reason this was not seen as a major problem back
| when we had websites and rss feeds
|
| Eh this kind of discounts how the entire world has changed
| between now and then.
|
| At one point online was something disconnected from who you
| were as in IRL identity. Really very few people posted back
| then (think tens of millions verses billions across the
| world). When you hung your modem up, that the online world
| and the real world were disconnected.
|
| That seperated world no longer exists for any number of
| reasons caused by any number of actors. The real world
| affects the internet and the internet affects the real
| world, these are no longer separate entities, but things
| that are intertwined by billions of connected devices and
| sensors almost everywhere.
|
| Quite often in the past middle sized sites got blasted by
| DOS attacks, and if your own small forum got a DOS/DDOS you
| could suffer some problems. Now, you don't even need an
| attacker to DOS most small sites, it's pretty damned easy
| to get search engines trying to index your site to take it
| off line, or for just random bots to be 99% of your
| traffic. People moved to big sites to avoid having to be
| said system administrators from all the crap that moved
| into the net.
| krapp wrote:
| It's simply that platforms are more convenient. Most
| bloggers never got a comment that wasn't spam, but
| platforms make it easier to find an audience. Platforms (if
| they're big enough) make it easier to find content relevant
| to your interests than webrings or link aggregators ever
| did. Most people don't want to learn how to hand-code HTML
| and run a server just to express themselves or communicate
| on the web. Curation is also a plus, but framing that as
| "wanting censorship" is disingenuous. What people want is
| stability and predictability.
|
| It also doesn't really lead to a blandification of content.
| The quality of _content_ on the web now is higher than its
| ever been. The value gained by being able to publish nearly
| effortlessly to the web without being a tech nerd is
| outweighed by the value lost in not being able to put a
| skull playing a trumpet in a site header.
| assimpleaspossi wrote:
| In my eyes, reddit is the same trash it's always been. Yes,
| you can find decent specialized subs here and there but, even
| then, you have to weed through the trash to get a decent
| response and keep a thick skin from those who are only there
| to put you down to make them feel better about themselves.
|
| And that's never going away.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| From 2006 when I joined until maybe just after Obama (2009
| or 2010, not sure? maybe as late as 2011) it was the best
| ever. Like HN on roids. Better than Slashdot that came
| before it, which was already a junk site by that point,
| larger than K5. Then it ate every internet forum ever, and
| turned into this weird authoritarian pervert Myspace thing.
|
| Now it's not even a website, but a phone app. I hesitate to
| click on reddit links unless they're old.* prefixed.
| herdrick wrote:
| https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/old-reddit-
| redirec...
| trealira wrote:
| If you have a Reddit account, you can opt out of the New
| Reddit design, so Old Reddit is displayed without the
| link needing to be prefixed with "old.*".
| pksebben wrote:
| This is an issue of connectivity. Some cultures cannot
| survive exposure to the world-at-large, and 4chan was one of
| them.
|
| I'm not sure I want to be part of "society at large",
| although I admit it doesn't seem optional. The establishment
| of the monoculture has gotten rid of a lot of good in the
| world (just try finding somewhere to visit _without_ a
| mcdonalds).
| bluetomcat wrote:
| The web of today has evolved to a product placement platform.
| It's optimised for finding quick up-to-date reviews of the next
| laptop you're considering buying. Old content becomes
| irrelevant and flows to the sewage pipe into oblivion. Social
| media users are building their "personal brand" and value
| proposition to their next employer/business partner.
| piva00 wrote:
| I've just finished reading Yanis Varoufakis'
| "Technofeudalism" and it was a much better read than I
| expected. I'm still unsure if his central thesis will
| materialise but he does make good points on how Big Tech
| basically transformed "Internet One" (the one we fondly
| remember from the 90s-early 2000s) into a internet of
| fiefdoms, where each Big Tech have tried to corner their own
| land to extract rent from.
|
| It's the exact feeling I get from the internet today, we have
| lost the interesting content being put out in a decentralised
| manner, the quirky websites, the passionate community ones
| for product reviews (like DPReview), everything has become
| commercialised, lots of blogs are just fronts for some
| brand/company/individual trying to peddle their own brand
| through visibility.
|
| It's just sad.
| keiferski wrote:
| I think this is a consequence of elite takeover of the
| internet. The culture you describe still exists, but it's
| largely found in places considered unsavory and uncouth by
| mainstream organizations.
| ManuelKiessling wrote:
| I've always considered it to be exactly the other way round:
| in the old days of yore, the Internet was dominated by a
| certain kind of elite, and then the Endless September
| happened and commercialization followed.
| keiferski wrote:
| It was dominated by an academic and intellectual elite
| somewhat detached from real world politics and economics,
| and was replaced by _that_ political and economic elite.
| flir wrote:
| I'd say there's been (at least) three overlapping
| generations: The academics (.edu email addresses), the
| geeky amateurs (dial-up internet), and the app users (the
| social media crowd).
|
| Not trying to denigrate the third generation there, it's
| just that for them it's a mature product, like a TV or a
| car. They feel no need to tinker with what BigCorp is
| selling them.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Where do the aol users fit? Part of the early app crowd?
| flir wrote:
| If I have to fit them to the model (which tbh I don't
| think bears close inspection) they're the vanguard of
| Generation 3. AOL was the first of the walled gardens. A
| proto-FaceGramTok.
| PeterisP wrote:
| Instead of overlapping generations, there's a gap of a
| whole generation of 'mainstream' internet users between
| the geeky amateurs/dial-up internet which arguably ceases
| being the dominant usecase already in mid-1990s before
| the dot.com boom starts due to this generation, and the
| app users which get seriously started only from around
| 2010.
|
| Those users were large numbers of mainstream non-geeky
| people, but they used websites on desktop computers, not
| through the walled garden of facebook on a phone.
| wintogreen74 wrote:
| >> elite takeover of the internet.
|
| Wasn't the internet solely the domain of the (techno) elite
| for a very long time? It's the masses that have wrecked what
| we had, the the "new" elite profiting off of them. Maybe the
| societal gains outweigh what we lost, but if you were part of
| the original elite 20+ years ago, you're now in a much worse
| place.
| keiferski wrote:
| I wouldn't consider academics and technologists to be the
| "elite" in a societal sense. I'm talking about the people
| that go to Ivy League schools and make up positions in top
| companies and government organizations.
|
| For example: the New York Times ran an editorial in the 90s
| about how the internet would have a similar effect to fax
| machines. They are an elite organization and didn't care
| about the internet much then. Now, twenty five years later,
| they do care a lot about what's on the internet.
| pipeline_peak wrote:
| It's like my options are go by an anonymous handle like
| CoolJeff9586 and be ignored or use my real name and risk
| cementing away any future prospects because I said Justin
| Bieber should die back in 2011...
|
| Who would've thought using legal fucking names online would be
| bad
| Juraph wrote:
| Not so sure it's all doom and gloom for "old internet". I still
| find plenty of spaces that feel like they're created purely for
| the love it it, there is just many orders of magnitude more
| crap you need to sift through. The people writing about
| interesting things compete with people who write as a form of
| personal branding, and these people aggressively measure
| engagement (You know the type).
|
| I remember reading one of these blogs, and saw something like
| "You have an obligation to advertise your content to potential
| users", the very idea of which is genuinely insane. Imagine
| trying to run a banner ad linking to your blog. But, those are
| the people who will play the SEO game, and they're the people
| you'll find in the first 2 pages of search.
| mrkramer wrote:
| I agree with you but the fact that there is no good blog
| search engine out there shows you the state of the web that
| we are in right now. Nobody cares anymore for blogs and
| personal websites, everything is commercialized to the point
| that SEO is name of the game of the web today.
| sotix wrote:
| Kagi small web and Marginalia do a pretty good job. Even
| the regular Kagi search delivers smaller blogs in my
| results frequently that end up being very useful to resolve
| what I had searched for.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Perhaps there is some space for community projects that
| collect links to blogs and tag them and build a simple
| search for that. Does it perhaps exist?
| mrkramer wrote:
| Last time I searched on Google for some decent blog
| search engine I couldn't find one. People say Google
| Custom Search is good, you can also see Marginalia and
| Kagi getting mentioned a lot. I didn't try neither of
| them, well except Marginalia but I think Marginalia
| prefers text only search results but modern blogs are not
| text only. There was good HN blog search project[0] but
| it is dead now.
|
| I think most probably blog search engine wouldn't be
| viable as a commercial product but some hobbyist can
| definitely pull it off. Good example is listennotes.com a
| hobbyist search engine for podcasts.
|
| I had a decent idea for a blog search engine, I will try
| to pull it off if time and health serve me.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30844149
| huijzer wrote:
| X/Twitter still supports anonymous accounts right?
| tivert wrote:
| It's all fun until the parasites move in.
|
| One of the magic bits of the earlier web(s) is that it was all
| new, participation involved an element of non-replicable self-
| selection, and the parasites hadn't had enough time to adapt
| and colonize it.
|
| I'm not even sure if it's will be possible to have a community
| of "pseudoanonymous amateurs" in the future. It'll probably get
| swamped with AI generated garbage, like the crochet groups
| posted about a week or so ago. The human participants will get
| overwhelmed trying to figure out what's fake.
|
| Honestly, like many kinds of forest, what the Web probably
| needs is a good burning, controlled or otherwise.
| pphysch wrote:
| Yep -- early adopters saw it as just another way to
| communicate between humans, and didn't aggressively push the
| envelop on how much anonymity+reach could be abused.
| Gradually, that envelop got expanded and now we have well-
| capitalized influence operations (including advertisement)
| solely focused on exploiting the internet as much as possible
| for financial+political gain.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| One of the last remaining remnants of this is the pirating
| community. Their work on cracking, emulation, system hacking
| and anonymity is such a wonderful place to make friends, push
| technology and just have fun. They still have that old school
| humour which made the internet so cool.
| CM30 wrote:
| I'd say that video game modding and hacking communities have
| a similar vibe to them, as do fan created content sites and
| communities in general.
|
| Probably in all causes because being unable to legally make
| money from your activities scares away folks that just want
| to cash in on the latest grift, and don't care a single damn
| about quality.
| unkeen wrote:
| how do i get in there?
| immibis wrote:
| You don't. If you could, the FBI could. You would have to
| be introduced by a friend who's in it.
| ghaff wrote:
| On the other hand, in Usenet days, a lot of people were coming
| in from fairly elite institutions (whether academia or
| companies) and they were absolutely using their True Names and
| institutional associations. There was a bifurcation between
| this and people who participated under handles that weren't
| obviously linked to discoverable account (which was more
| associated with BBSs early on).
| bufio wrote:
| Smartphones ruined the web and are ruining life in general.
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| Social-media ate the traffic. A 10 minute video of someone typing
| on you-tube will capture more views than a well formatted
| website. Thus, people just started gleaning other peoples static
| content into low-effort media. These days there are bots that
| automate this process to make garbage content.
|
| Perhaps you meant to ask "why has the signal-to-noise ratio
| dropped on the modern web?"...
| wt__ wrote:
| Related reading: Picked up a copy of a book called "We Got Blog:
| How weblogs are changing our culture" in the university library a
| few days ago, published in 2002. An nostalgic and interesting,
| albeit rather random, semi-curated collection of blog posts from
| prominent, mainly US, bloggers. Tells the story of Blogger too.
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/928428.We_ve_Got_Blog
| mpliax wrote:
| Archived version if anyone needs it: https://archive.is/5sxo8
| Almondsetat wrote:
| The "old web" is one of the cases in which people forget about
| absolute numbers and focus too much on relative proportions.
|
| There are more independent websites than you could ever visit in
| a lifetime. Who cares if they "lost" to the social networks
| relatively speaking.
| lmm wrote:
| Meh. Something like textsfromlastnight has probably been replaced
| by a subreddit, and I like it better that way - no custom CSS to
| get in the way of me reading it (the same reason that Facebook
| won out over MySpace, IMO - you don't actually want all of your
| friends' pages to look different, you want the design to be
| something bland that gets out of the way). Yes, these things used
| to be their own websites and now they're largely not. But usually
| you wanted the content, not the website, and that's easier than
| ever to get at.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > the same reason that Facebook won out over MySpace, IMO - you
| don't actually want all of your friends' pages to look
| different, you want the design to be something bland that gets
| out of the way
|
| 100%. I had the exact same impression at the time.
| thomasfromcdnjs wrote:
| meh++
| cousin_it wrote:
| Yeah, I also like the idea of linkposts. I read some bloggers who
| make regular linkposts with a bit of personal flavor, and it's
| one of the nicest things about the web today.
|
| Another maybe related question is, where have all the social
| networks gone? It used to be that people wrote about their life
| on the internet and other people read it. But now it seems
| everyone's trying to craft their online presence to maximize
| attention. For example Instagram is no longer a social network,
| it's a self-promotion network. Getting likes is not socializing.
| shiroiuma wrote:
| >Another maybe related question is, where have all the social
| networks gone? It used to be that people wrote about their life
| on the internet and other people read it.
|
| That fell out of favor when too many people's lives or
| relationships or employment were ruined by this. People are
| more savvy now and know the risks of posting their personal
| info on the internet for the world to see.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Evil Mad Scientist have a monthly (well, maybe not every month)
| link post.
|
| https://www.evilmadscientist.com
| pomian wrote:
| Hey! What a cool collection of links. It's a perfect HN
| rabbit hole!
| Brajeshwar wrote:
| I'm going to start writing more, again. I'm definitely stealing
| this one, "2086(c) (so I don't forget to change the year) From
| Jason."
| INTPenis wrote:
| I think it's just numbers. Us internet users used to be a
| minority, and in a very short time a huge influx of new users
| came online through apps.
|
| So relatively if you look at the numbers no one is using websites
| anymore, but I'd be willing to bet that some of us old internet
| users still use the internet much as we used to.
|
| The websites I still visit are mostly old message boards.
|
| And of course I visit a lot of blogs but they're always linked
| from a message board. I don't subscribe to any blogs but that's
| just personal preference, I never did before either.
| cybrox wrote:
| You're still part of a minority now. Namely the few people that
| remember what the internet used to be like and still browse it
| like they used to.
|
| For a large part of users, the internet is not websites,
| message boards or blogs. It's the four or five content
| aggregation pages that they got started on, because those
| invest huge sums of money into keeping people on their
| platforms. (And into SEO to lead them back to their platforms,
| should they dare to venture out).
|
| I think the author is very well aware that message boards and
| blogs still exist. They just don't have a prominent spot in
| today's internet world anymore. And you bet if any of them
| dares to produce quality content, it will be ripped and
| regurgitated ad nauseam on content aggregators like TikTok and
| Reddit.
| detay wrote:
| social media ate it
| detay wrote:
| social media ate them
| seydor wrote:
| i think it was a mistake for most sites to disable comments. You
| just gave away your audience to facebook and tiktok. people are
| selfish, they like to give feedback and rant about anything.
| BigTech definitely nudged them away from that and into their
| garden. Yeah, spam does not scale, but you 'd have to deal with
| that, things that scale get eaten.
|
| The OP's blog would get a lot more engagement if it had a comment
| form underneat
| pixl97 wrote:
| >i think it was a mistake for most sites to disable comments.
|
| It was not a mistake at all, and you stated exactly why. Spam.
|
| Not just spam.
|
| Spam. Spam. Spam. Spam. Spam. Spam.
|
| A never ending torrent of shit. An ocean of it.
|
| And that's before the mean spirited comments, trolls, outright
| illegal posts and more. Oh, and if you post anything really
| controversial, might as well get behind cloudflare now before
| you get blasted off the internet.
| mazzystar wrote:
| I share the same sentiment, which is why I created this website:
| https://www.sublink.app It's not about promoting anything, but
| rather, I genuinely wish for a platform where everyone can curate
| their favorite websites and articles, you can read my article
| here: https://mazzzystar.github.io/2023/12/07/sublink/
| PsyNyde wrote:
| unrelated to the post but this website is dope <3
| nicgrev103 wrote:
| I used to love a site called 'Stumble Upon' that would take you
| to random interesting websites. Those were the days.
| splitbrain wrote:
| Not exactly the same, but the spirit is similar:
| https://indieblog.page/
| benguild wrote:
| I feel like Wikipedia is one thing that helped take down a lot of
| topic-specific indie sites or home/about pages. Before, you could
| make a site about anything and find it via a search engine. That
| was part of the exciting surprise factor of the old web.
|
| Now, Wikipedia coverage is kind of like an expected existence for
| a lot of things. When Google started to rank Wikipedia very
| highly for search terms, that was the beginning of this shift
| Whoppertime wrote:
| And this is where we get hybrids. Topic specific wikis. If I
| want to know about quests in a Fallout game I check one wiki if
| I want to know about alternate universe Lex Luthors I check
| another wiki.
| didntcheck wrote:
| And of course they themselves have experienced the same
| phenomenon, with 90% of fandom wikis being absorbed into the
| blob that is "Fandom (tm)". It's turned fan wikis from what
| felt like niche non-commercial projects into yet another
| corporate entity trying to sell me more Marvel movies
| chasd00 wrote:
| my kids pour over the SCP foundation wiki. All fan made up
| content, very detailed and a lot of it. It's pretty amazing
| really what a community has put together and maintained
| without a profit motive behind it.
|
| on an aside, i think a lot of regular websites are considered
| failures because the definition of success has radically
| changed. Unless you achieve complete internet domination in
| your domain then your site is failure.
| jayveeone wrote:
| This is a really good point.
| mnky9800n wrote:
| I feel like hacker news is the curated content that the author
| wants, at least for technology.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| I think what changed was education. Digging through the internet
| archive, as I do about 16 hours a day (as an out-of-work RoR dev
| with a nostalgia problem), I see many sites that look like they
| were started by highschoolers. And that reminded me that once
| upon a time, computer literacy in school meant "have the kids put
| some HTML and PHP on the school webserver". These days, they're
| probably learning how to crack leetcode or something that won't
| result in fun websites.
| mrkramer wrote:
| Commercial web was something wildly new and wildly interesting
| for all the people that used it because such a thing never
| existed before but web consolidated over the years and now people
| find it boring and not that useful. We should support and fight
| more for the "Open Web" nature of the web and slow down with
| walled gardens.
|
| Speaking of "Where Have All the Websites Gone?", they are most
| likely dead. There are millions of dead websites that no longer
| exist on the WWW. I didn't do any formal research or data mining
| project but my assumption is that there are more dead websites
| than there are alive websites or in another words websites that
| exist today on the web. Since history is a passion of my, I think
| I and others should do more to explore and perhaps revive those
| websites for the sake of information and knowledge preservation
| and retrieval.
| blackhaj7 wrote:
| Really enjoyed the post, the recommended sites and the authors
| general website
| aethertron wrote:
| A personal site is a lonely place. That's why blogs, after an
| initial burst of creative energy, languish. People nowadays
| seeking online to fulfil their social inclinations go elsewhere,
| to the platforms better optimised to harness that social energy.
|
| Another reason blogs have languished: discussions come to an end,
| a point of exhaustion. When everything that's there to be said,
| has been. Retreading old ground is not the same as posting
| original thoughts. Different qualities of people do these things.
| mrkramer wrote:
| >A personal site is a lonely place. That's why blogs, after an
| initial burst of creative energy, languish. People nowadays
| seeking online to fulfil their social inclinations go
| elsewhere, to the platforms better optimised to harness that
| social energy.
|
| A personal site or blog might be a lonely place in the early
| days but then came comments section and people started
| discussing your articles but then came the question of
| persistence of your profile and I think Disqus is a pretty good
| web commenting solution to that regard.
|
| The biggest problem of big social platforms is content
| discovery; there is so much content out there that you can not
| find the content that suits you the best. That's why you see
| "Discover" feature in every app because they became aware of
| that problem. That's also why TikTok took off so wildly because
| they glued together short attention content (short videos) with
| powerful recommendation system.
|
| Like somebody already said, web and social platforms push only
| new content to you, they are sort of like TVs but there is vast
| amount of content and websites that are never discovered and
| visited because the right incentives aren't there to show you
| old content and old websites.
| aethertron wrote:
| The advent of commenting did mitigate the lonesomeness of
| independent blogging. Then social media sapped away much of
| that social energy, returning blogging to its natural state
| of solitude. Bloggers can try to nurture community, but it's
| a hard task. Maybe the advent of reader-funded blogging will
| re-energise the practice. I hope it will.
|
| Disqus seems good on paper. Seems something like Disqus is in
| a position to facilitate content discovery: it has ads so it
| could also add related or recommended links to other stuff in
| the ecosystem.
| mrkramer wrote:
| >The advent of commenting did mitigate the lonesomeness of
| independent blogging. Then social media sapped away much of
| that social energy, returning blogging to its natural state
| of solitude. Bloggers can try to nurture community, but
| it's a hard task. Maybe the advent of reader-funded
| blogging will re-energise the practice. I hope it will.
|
| Web blogging was fragmented across independent web sites,
| Blogger and walled gardens like Tumblr, Medium and Twitter
| and it couldn't thrive on all of them and at the end it
| didn't thrive on any of them. The best solution is open web
| and that is independent web sites. Open web provides you
| freedom to customize whatever you want and you can play
| with Atom, RSS, comments section etc. Some people are not
| tech savvy enough to blog but Blogger seems like a good
| solution because it is easy to use and it is open but
| unfortunately Google didn't invest in it for years and will
| probably shut it down sooner or later.
| aethertron wrote:
| I am pro open web. I like the remix-ability of its tools.
| But walled gardens are easier to use, as they've invested
| in design, and designed for non-power-users. Open web
| enjoyers need to build better tools, and/or accept that
| it's going to be a smaller domain of the tech-savvy, or
| try to raise the technical abilities of the general
| public (perhaps via better tools?).
| fullshark wrote:
| The internet is a lonely place, all these substitutes for in
| person communication and interaction fail and will always fail.
| It's why we're more connected and more lonely than ever. Sure
| you can now find that person halfway around the world that
| agrees with you on some esoteric topic you care about, but
| that's not a real relationship.
| cloverich wrote:
| Well, the apps aren't designed to cultivate that relationship
| is the thing. They are designed to drive content engagement
| -- doom scrolling is the ultimate goal of every major social
| media platform of today, because that is where the ad revenue
| is.
|
| There's no technical reason apps can't be designed to connect
| you more meaningfully to individuals that you resonate with.
| The problem for them is once that starts to happen, you don't
| need the platform as much and your engagement with it drops.
| It requires a company that focuses on that, and not
| engagement / pure revenue, as a focus. I'd wager the main
| reason those companies haven't taken off is people like
| money. If you are good enough to build such a platform,
| you're also good enough to make 250k+ _today_. If you are
| currently making 80k, it is a very hard thing to turn down.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| That's because the vast majority of people don't care about
| what the other vast majority think or say. Social media only
| works because algorithms push provocative content. Otherwise
| nobody would find it worth the time.
| taopai wrote:
| Good old forums.
|
| I am lucky I found one in my own language recently. We are a
| small community, like 250 active users. Most of it is joking,
| having a blast, and insulting. It's very funny.
|
| For me forums are the best of internet. I don't consider reddit a
| forum because it has an opaque algorithm. Hackernews is great,
| but it's threads are very short lived, and it's to big to be a
| functional traditional forum.
| HeckFeck wrote:
| This is what I associate with my best days online. Good old
| threaded message boards with persistent conversations.
|
| They're not completely dead but there are fewer than there
| were. And newer forum software like Discourse that tries to
| mimic Reddit or StackOverflow is not the same.
| smallnix wrote:
| I always disliked forums. With the groups very tight nit,
| elitist, and only referring to some garbage search function.
| aaron695 wrote:
| TikTok accounts cover many of those websites, TikTok hashtags
| cover many of the others.
|
| I'd just say most people here are near death and can't learn the
| new way.
|
| The same as some felt lost when the magazines disappeared to
| websites.
|
| The old modeling (miniature) magazines and computer mags were
| awesome, but we moved on. Some great things were lost, more was
| gained.
|
| Anthony Bourdain website now is Martin Shkreli's TikTok (which is
| really interesting)
|
| Adapt or die.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| textsfromlastnight.com still exists[1], but it's not even linked
| in the article. The websites are not gone, you just have to find
| and link them.
|
| [1]: https://textsfromlastnight.com/
| xtiansimon wrote:
| They still show up at Kottke (curated) and Metafilter (community)
| from time to time.
| bovermyer wrote:
| My entry into this idea is a web directory for TTRPG generators.
|
| https://rpggen.dev
|
| I curate this site manually. Source is on Github, in case people
| want to contribute.
| renegat0x0 wrote:
| Internet is corporate now. Therefore it leads to corporations.
| Corporations lead to other corporations. Big platforms lead to
| big platforms.
|
| Internet is ad bisness right now. Anything that is not monetized,
| falls into obscurity. You will not have the scale, budget,
| readers, followers without big money.
|
| It is not a hostile "elite takeover", but it is organic result of
| big corporations entering the game.
|
| You cannot moderate Internet for disinformation. Big brother
| cannot easily ban "words" "extremism" on the Internet, and cannot
| control speech. Social media platforms can moderate their
| contents, can ban people, and control what is being said, what is
| true, and what is not true. This produce a nice coherent version
| of world seen by big corporations, but is not entirely true. I
| think it is beneficial for corporations, elite, big brother to
| channel all communication through social platforms.
|
| Internet cannot be personal and private any more. No corporation
| will have any incentive for that. It is impossible at personal
| level to have search engine. It requires corporation, or
| organization.
|
| There are millions, and millions of the lost Internet. Google
| does not rank it, as it has difficulty to say what is important
| anymore. Most of the traffic is beyond scope of Google. Does
| Google knows what exactly goes through TikTok, discord? Probably
| it has some idea.
|
| People themselves have changed. Most of the traffic goes to
| celebrity photos at Instagram, memes, logan paul videos. Nobody
| is interested in any form of writing/reading. Most of the
| Internet users are too dumb to comprehend anything what would
| interest 'us'.
|
| Google creates a Internet bubble for everyone. It is really
| difficult to find anything interesting. It often leads to
| mainstream links. Maybe because it is more reliable, less chance
| of disinformation. Not sure.
|
| Internet is a shopping mall right now, more than a place to find
| Interesting places. Corporations built roads toward their own
| shops. This starved creative people out of their small nests.
|
| Google rolls out EEAT for SEO. What could any blog do to be
| relevant in EEAT? I think it can do nothing.
|
| Internet is dead. Google is potemkin village.
| dividefuel wrote:
| The causes seem two-fold.
|
| One is that most people consume content in apps, so most creators
| create contents for that audience. TikTok, Twitter, Reddit,
| Facebook, YouTube, etc are where users are, so it's where
| creators put their content for visibility. Related to this is, I
| feel, the switch to mobile, where the more limited UX of the
| device makes it a LOT easier to just stay in the same app rather
| than type URLs or manage a ton of bookmarks. For many people who
| weren't computer literate in the 2000s, they find apps on their
| phone MUCH easier to use than a browser with mouse/keyboard.
|
| The other is the huge rise of SEO spam sites. They dilute search
| results and waste time. Combined with the first point, there's
| now far less signal and far more noise than ever, so often
| looking for websites isn't fruitful. This creates the feedback
| loop: users aren't looking for websites, so why create content on
| websites?
|
| EDIT: I'll add that I often think of StumbleUpon, which my
| friends and I really enjoyed using around 2010. It was enjoyable
| clicking a button and being taken to a random page on the
| Internet: a funny video, a deep dive on WW2, a quirky page
| devoted to someone's pet tarantula. The variety of topics and
| experiences you would encounter were much broader than what you'd
| see today, where most content follows the same patterns to
| achieve success for its respective platform. StumbleUpon could
| not be successful today.
| pksebben wrote:
| Stumbleupon! What a gleaming ray of sunshine in the vast
| landscape of the web!
|
| I agree with you that it couldn't survive today, but I often
| wonder _why_. If I had access to stumbleupon as it was, I would
| absolutely be using it - but when I try to think about how to
| reimplement it there are a couple sticking points that I don 't
| have any solutions to: - Engagement: SU lived
| and died on it's users, a paragon of the crowdsourced model.
| For it to work you'd have to have it pull enough interesting
| people from the mire to function - Gaming the
| system: One of the things that made SU great was that there
| wasn't so much goddamn SEO out there. If you 'stumbled' on a
| thing, it was because it was interesting, engaging, funny, or
| otherwise *actually valuable*. These days, I can't imagine a
| successful platform *not* getting beleaguered by the SEO
| vultures.
| cloverich wrote:
| I think the SEO problem would be harder. Even though there's
| definitely a network effect, a few dedicated users can curate
| a thousand interesting web sites, and that's probably enough
| to draw in anyone moderately interested.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| In regards to "Gaming the system," I do not think popularity
| begets SEO spam. SEO spam is a specific game to rank high in
| google search so that you get ad revenue from visits. If you
| have genuinely valuable content and get popular from
| Stumbleupon that doesn't create an incentive to implement SEO
| spam. Ads maybe - but not publishing garbage to rank high on
| google search because you already solved the discoverability
| problem.
| sideshowb wrote:
| It's not the successful website that turns to seo spam,
| it's seo spammers that spam the StumbleUpon api with bots
| "liking" their spam.
| reaperman wrote:
| > SEO spam is a specific game to rank high in google search
|
| The same SEO mindset/paradigm is used to make sure
| someone's spam surfaces on any variety of platforms, not
| just Google Search. We can argue about the specific
| semantics of "SEO" ( _Search Engine_ Optimization) not
| being the right word to use for gaming TikTok, Reddit,
| Instagram, Facebook, or Snapchat algorithms. Perhaps a
| different word is needed.
|
| But the above poster's sentiment is not flawed, even if you
| think it's overreaching within a specific meaning of "SEO".
| longwave wrote:
| This site has seemingly solved both of those problems. So
| isn't HN the modern StumbleUpon, albeit with more focus on
| technical topics?
| immibis wrote:
| SU was always one of the many aggregators in the addth.is
| toolbar, alongside places like Reddit. They do both serve
| the same function of making the Internet more discoverable
| - noting that early Reddit didn't have comments.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| Or Stumbleupon clone's aren't popular because there really
| just isnt a lot of demand for them. Stumbleupon clones
| already exist. People generally prefer social media and in
| this case I'd say Reddit more specifically.
|
| Here is one I found with a 5 second search:
| https://cloudhiker.net/
|
| It works great. It's fun. Hopefully people will enjoy it. But
| I dont think we need to make excuses for why its not more
| popular.
| ipaddr wrote:
| That looks great. Is there a list of these types of sites?
| rozap wrote:
| I agreed that I thought SU wouldn't work in today's
| internet, and I clicked on the cloudhiker link thinking I'd
| be met with SEO trash, but I ended up on this post:
| https://dynomight.net/ikea-purifier
|
| Which was a great post and now I understand more than I did
| about how air filters work...more complicated than I'd
| thought.
|
| Maybe I should give cloudhiker a try.
| genewitch wrote:
| I read the page because you linked it, as an aside "
| (Yeah, power usage goes down when you add the extra
| carbon filter to the IKEA purifier. I've confirmed this
| myself with a power meter. Physics is weird.)"
|
| when you block a vacuum cleaner the motor spins faster
| and uses less electricity, it just sounds like it's
| "working harder" but if there's less stuff (air) there to
| create friction then it's working less hard. So the
| heavier filter material using less electricity makes
| sense, especially when you take into account the lower
| "CADR" - wtf-ever that is.
|
| Furthermore , all of my "DIY" air filters do a remarkable
| job, and they move very little air compared to the fans
| they're duct taped to, but they still turn black if i
| don't clean them every month or two.
| darreninthenet wrote:
| Looks great, makes a really great statement on its front
| page and then offers their extension for your browser...
| the link goes straight to the Chrome store, no other
| browser gets the extension support it seems
| fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
| One issue is a lot more sites today have headers that
| block displaying the site in a frame. This prevents sites
| like StumbleUpon from displaying their UI at the same
| time as the content; the only way around it that I'm
| aware of is a browser extension.
| ShamelessC wrote:
| How is that related to other browsers not getting an
| extension?
| fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
| Because it's more work to maintain an extension for N
| browsers than to maintain a single website. So developers
| tend to just pick the one they care about.
| darreninthenet wrote:
| And unfortunately in doing so, which is where my point
| really was, continue the Chromification of the
| internet... this seems to be counter to the theme of what
| they set out to do
| mcbishop wrote:
| cloudhiker just took me to a delightful site. Fun rewarding
| experience, will prob never use it again.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Hmm, my first cloudhiker link gives me a:
|
| Five Tips to Make Meditation Easy and Enjoyable - Video
| Five questions that beginning meditators...
|
| Not exactly what I was hoping for.
| dividefuel wrote:
| I think there are many reasons why SU would fail, but the
| biggest to me is that so much content is that so much content
| is produced just for the major social media sites. SU
| wouldn't offer net value over just using those apps.
|
| For example, consider what the UX on mobile would be like. A
| modern SU would often send you to the major social media
| sites since that's where the content is. But you'd either
| constantly encounter login walls or "download the app!"
| banners OR you'd have to constantly shift back and forth
| between apps. As a user why would I put up with that, when I
| could just stay in one app and see so much of the same
| content?
| electrondood wrote:
| I miss Stumbleupon and discoverability. I despise the me-
| shaped bubble that I'm forced to occupy on the current,
| broken internet.
| yetanother12345 wrote:
| > I can't imagine a successful platform _not_ getting
| beleaguered by the SEO
|
| May I suggest inclusion of the following snippet in the
| <head> section of every page on such a site:
| <meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">
|
| That single line would be enough to make any site very
| UNappealing to SEOs
| dpkirchner wrote:
| I'd add a third fold: the huge rise in garbage ads above,
| below, overlapping, and surrounding content. Facebook et al
| have ads, of course, but they are extremely "tame" by
| comparison. Renting out every pixel ruined many sites.
| mangodrunk wrote:
| I agree with you, and I don't understand why some of these
| small blogs on niche topics even have ads. How much are they
| making a month? I'd be surprised if it's even $5 a month for
| many of them.
| dspillett wrote:
| _> I'd be surprised if it's even $5 a month for many of
| them._
|
| I doubt it is even that, or close, if you take any average
| reading.
|
| _> I don't understand why some of these small blogs on
| niche topics even have ads._
|
| I think in many cases they have the ads there just in case
| one day they randomly get mentioned in a high-profile
| place, get a pile of traffic, and that makes them an amount
| in ad revenue worth caring about. Of course, they probably
| underestimate the effect of such a glut of traffic, most
| likely their site will grind to a halt long before much ad
| revenue is totted up, and their "15 minutes" will be over
| before it is back up again.
|
| In some cases it is simply that they've chosen to host
| somewhere "free" where they have little or no control over
| the ad content, and probably never see a penny of any
| revenue from it (the host takes that in exchange for the
| "free" services).
| nvm0n2 wrote:
| Sometimes they're put there by the hosting provider. The
| blog author doesn't get the money, it all goes towards
| hosting costs. Which are, you know, real. Running a blog
| costs continuous money even if you don't have many visitors
| because of constant crawling, spam attacks, the need to
| have a machine online 24/7 etc.
| Dah00n wrote:
| >constant crawling, spam attacks
|
| It seems a bit wild if those two could make any
| difference in costs. I mean, if you have one visit a
| month and pay per megabyte then sure, Google would maybe
| show up in stats, but otherwise?
| interroboink wrote:
| Re StumbleUpon: you might be interested in the "random page"
| feature of wiby.me: https://wiby.me/surprise/
| jwells89 wrote:
| IMO "apps" is something of a red herring. I don't think a whole
| lot would change if somehow everybody switched to web versions
| of big social media; they'd just be endlessly scrolling in a
| single browser tab instead of in a single app.
|
| This effect was apparent back before smartphones became
| ubiquitous, where desktop users (especially more casual/less
| technical) were spending disproportionate amounts of time on
| Facebook and YouTube. It's where we first started seeing people
| sourcing their news exclusively from social media.
|
| Some qualities of apps may bolster this effect, but the root
| problem lies in the addictiveness, convenience, endlessness,
| and network effects of large platforms.
| shuntress wrote:
| "Apps" in this contexts means "Platforms" or a "Closed" web
| vs the "Open" web.
| dividefuel wrote:
| Yes, this, thank you for clarifying.
|
| These major platforms offer a much more streamlined UX for
| passively consuming content than a web browser, and most
| people seem to prefer that simpler UX.
| dylan604 wrote:
| But these platforms _want_ you on their app instead of
| webpages. That 's why the apps exist. There's a reason they
| are willing to go through the hassle/expense of maintaining
| native code apps instead of just one website. It is the core
| of their business.
| jwells89 wrote:
| Of course, platforms are going to do everything in their
| power to exert as strong as a grip as possible on users.
|
| The thing is though, with the amounts of money involved
| even small improvements in engagement and retention justify
| considerable expenditures. Their willingness to spend on
| things like native apps is not necessarily representative
| of the impact of those things.
| dylan604 wrote:
| There's also the stigma of being a web only platform in
| the view of the younger users.
| Paul-Craft wrote:
| I'll give you spam sites, but I'll also note that at least 4 of
| the 5 examples you gave of where people go to consume content
| in apps also have highly functional and usable websites, even
| on mobile. I'm not familiar with TikTok, so I can't comment on
| it.
|
| I'd also note that if you want to just, say, consume from
| YouTube, spam sites are no longer in the picture.
| karaterobot wrote:
| I struggle to keep up with all the blogs and niche communities I
| watch. I spend too much time on websites (like HN). I rarely
| cannot find a good website about some subject--yes, there is lots
| of spam. I'm not on any social networks, or TikTok, or anything
| like that, so maybe I just never lost the connection this author
| can't seem to find. I don't agree with the premise of the article
| because it doesn't match my experience, though it's just my
| experience.
| zubairq wrote:
| Yeah it does feel like all the websites have gone, it only the
| static ones
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I found a web page on my drive that I had created, I don't
| know, maybe two decades ago. For kicks I opened it in a browser
| (cringe) and for laughs clicked on the links.
|
| To no one's surprise they were essentially all dead. Curiously
| the only one that worked was to a Pixies (the band) site.
| eshack94 wrote:
| > It's Tuesday morning. The year is 2009. You're just waking up
| after a long and boozy New Year's Eve with friends.
|
| I digress, but I think the first day of the year in 2009 was
| Thursday, January 1st, 2009.
|
| Well-written post. I share the sentiment and I find myself
| longing for new ways to find creative/interesting content on the
| web. Seems like there are too many gatekeepers of content these
| days and it's hard to keep up with blogs and niche interests.
| More difficult than it used to be, at least.
| troupo wrote:
| After long and boozy night? It might as well be Tuesday :)
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| For you, that was the worst hangover of your life. For me, it
| was Tuesday.
| Swizec wrote:
| > it's hard to keep up with blogs and niche interests. More
| difficult than it used to be, at least
|
| It _is_ hard to keep up with niche interests! I blame it on
| being 36 with real responsibilities instead of 22 and in
| college.
|
| I suspect that has a much bigger impact than the state of the
| web/internet today. My younger more energetic coworkers tell me
| about all sorts of fun and wonderful things they discover and
| deep-dive on TikTok. Just as I used to on blogs. The format is
| different but the variety and serendipity remains. If anything,
| "kids these days" have way more content and creators than we
| did.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Way more content, maybe, but on platforms that are not made
| for long term retention and curation, but for attention span
| of a fruit fly and optimized for engagement. The content
| might get the quick giggle or wow, but then it has passed.
| TikTok and similar are not the kind of platform that I would
| search answers to questions on or that I would use to follow
| a hobby in depth. Perhaps my hobbies don't lend themselves to
| being represented by TikTok shorts or whatever they call them
| there.
| Swizec wrote:
| And yet I listened to a podcast once where a _tax
| accountant_ explained that Instagram Search is her
| strongest lead pipeline.
|
| At my dayjob we do women's health, actual clinics with real
| doctors. Many of our users come from Instagram and TikTok
| ads. Because yes people will in fact choose their doctor
| based on a good Instagram/TikTok presence. In fact any time
| I mention the brand to female friends who live in our
| target markets they go _"Oh yeah! I've seen your ads on
| Instagram"_. It's never search, or a billboard, or a blog,
| or youtube, or even me telling them about it. They
| recognize us from Instagram and Tok.
|
| It's a wild world out there my friend. Makes me wanna yell
| at clouds every day.
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| Backing this up. Google is presently most feeling
| threatened by TikTok, not OpenAI.
|
| Because an entire generation of new American adults does
| not use web browsers, like much at all.
|
| Want a burger? You probably open Chrome, go to Google or
| Kagi and type "Burger $myCity"
|
| People under 25 use TikTok and Instagram and just look
| for "burger" and are blasted by 300 10s videos of real
| people munching and smiling. Like a perfect commercial
| and entirely crowdsourced.
|
| That's the new internet. The kids only know 'content'.
| They don't know what the fuck an HTML file is.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| I'm curious to what extent this is honest to God actually
| true. Maybe the very first time I ever move to a new city
| and want a burger, my first thought is find some
| directory service telling me where burgers can be found.
| Right now, I have a kitchen and a grill and would make
| the burger myself as a first choice, and if not, I've
| lived in the same house for seven years now and have a
| great dive bar a block away I can walk to that my wife
| and I have hung out at forever where we know the owner
| and staff and they make terrific burgers, better than
| anywhere I've been in the city in the now nine years I've
| lived in this city.
|
| Do people really just perpetually not know where to get
| something they want in the place they live?
| Swizec wrote:
| > Do people really just perpetually not know where to get
| something they want in the place they live?
|
| No but a) people travel and b) the young post-college
| demographic _is usually new to the area_. By virtue of
| being young and freshly out of college. They really don't
| know the city yet!
|
| Personally when I travel my search for burgers goes
| straight to Apple Maps.
| adaptbrian wrote:
| Wonder what that accountants ability to keep clients
| around looks like vs. Intentful Google searches, and what
| that market would look like.
|
| You have to take the serious consideration that winning
| customers from tiktok is going to be a wildly different
| persona than from google.
|
| Churn and burn practices are for folks who've not seen
| the 5th year of their used to be sustainable market crash
| when arbitrary platform dynamics change and they don't
| realize they've been working with the wrong type of
| client that whole time.
|
| I work in Healthcare as well. It's just a giant farm so
| folks will take anyone who is alive and insured. I could
| see TokTik do well there.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| I, and I'm sure there are many others in their 30's who would
| agree, prefer to get my information in written form.
| Pictures/diagrams are fine, but I don't want to watch a 10-15
| minute video, or even a 2 minute video to get information I
| can read in less than 30 seconds. "Kids" these days seem to
| prefer the video medium much more. I don't know why, but I
| find it interesting that reading scores have also tanked a
| lot in the last 20 or some odd years.
| mwigdahl wrote:
| S. P. Somtow nailed this 43 years ago in _Mallworld_. It's
| completely confusing to me also.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| Wow, I never heard of that, sounds like I need that on my
| kindle ASAP. Thanks!
| booleandilemma wrote:
| Too many nitpickers nowadays too.
| rpastuszak wrote:
| Here's the list of indie web resources to I follow:
|
| https://untested.sonnet.io/Places+to+Find+Indie+Web+Content
| Ellipsis753 wrote:
| My cousin runs a very small home-made html blog. I really like it
| and it gives me that early 2000s nostalgia. I'm sure he'd be
| psyched if some people here were to read it.
|
| https://deadvey.com https://deadvey.com/blog/index.html
| https://deadvey.com/blog/feed.xml
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| Sorry. No. Tell him something about ergonomics and bad
| contrast. That color-scheme is a NO-GO.
| sdsd wrote:
| i recently created a website: 13channel.crabdance.com
|
| we only have a handful of users, feel free to join us.
|
| I think it's hard for people to stick around since there are no
| alerts, subscriptions, notifications, etc. You have to come back
| to the website and check.
| fullstick wrote:
| It's also hard to stick around when the website doesn't
| implement HTTPS and is insecure.
| sdsd wrote:
| lol. i guess someone on your local wifi might intercept your
| posting password and delete your post to 13channel!
|
| it's an anonymous imageboard with fairly uncontroversial
| topics. what's your threat model such that https would make
| you feel safer on 13channel?
|
| fwiw i agree, we're gonna implement it soon just as a matter
| of principle, but it does seem a bit silly - what are you
| worried about happening? what is there to "secure"?
| pomian wrote:
| This thinking, or questioning, is needed everywhere. There
| is so much security paranoia, that it affects any one, just
| trying to do something. From setting up a wifi router, to
| seeing up an email account. Passwords must be used. Walt
| for 2FA before proceeding. Change your password to include
| upper lower Roman numerals and at least 5 different
| fonts... Why? Instead of saying up a website in 15 minutes,
| there is an hour of preparing to set up a webpage. If I
| live in the country side, have no neighbors for 50 miles, I
| must secure my router going to my starlink. Why? Added
| complexity and regulations, seem to grow around us just as
| the beurocracies; schools, governments, companies - maybe
| our lives are just all dependent on the 3rd law of
| thermodynamics. Higher disorder? I recommend this amazing
| presentation, questioning the basics, and attitude in
| teamwork, of the Artemis project:
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?si=dHI-_EbDzcqJc-
| vF&v=OoJsPvmFix...
| herodoturtle wrote:
| > 2086(c) (so I don't forget to change the year)
|
| I love this guy.
| simonw wrote:
| I want more people to have link blogs.
|
| I have one in the sidebar of https://simonwillison.net/ which
| I've been running since November 2003. You can search through all
| 6,836 links here: https://simonwillison.net/search/?type=blogmark
|
| I can post things to it with a bookmarklet. It has an Atom feed.
|
| It's such a low-friction way of publishing. A lot of
| https://daringfireball.net works like this too. I also like
| https://waxy.org/ and https://kottke.org/ for this.
|
| I'd love to see more of these.
| epiccoleman wrote:
| I love this idea, I've got a ton of links that I was going to
| add to a post at some point. I like the idea of having a whole
| separate section on the blog for that, with a feed. Very cool,
| I'll have to find some time to add something like this to my
| site.
| mtillman wrote:
| have you seen https://ooh.directory ?
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| have you seen https://curlie.org ?
| simonw wrote:
| Hadn't looked since it launched, wow it's looking very
| healthy! Here's my listing there
| https://ooh.directory/blog/96nwv6/
| sanroot99 wrote:
| I have mine! https://sancoderr.netlify.app/links/
| jassyr wrote:
| I enjoyed the blog. Where do you find the time to post though,
| once you're done with work or do you schedule specific time to
| post?
| simonw wrote:
| I think the secret to blogging frequently might well be not
| having a job... I occasionally pick up pieces of consulting
| work or sponsorship but I'm mainly working full-time
| (uncompensated) on my own projects.
|
| Link blogs are different though: posting to those genuinely
| takes a couple of minutes per link. I've maintained my link
| blog happily while having a full-time job.
| mglz wrote:
| Here's mine: https://mglz.de/links.html
| sadpolishdev wrote:
| Internet centralized itself around few corporations, people don't
| want to selfhost/self publish websites, I have own devlog on
| github pages, and when I try to convince friends who do
| interesting things to start writing about them, its always "I'll
| just post on twitter" or "i'llshow some screens on discord" etc.
| Internet shrank in recent years greatly, with more and more dead
| places that are not updated being closed down due to hosting
| issues or simply lack of interest from original authors. It gets
| sadder when one of corporation suddenly decides that whole genre
| of things is not welcomed and/or just simply pull the plug on
| certain functionality/content.
|
| Same goes with old phpbb forums - everyone sits on various
| discords, and places-pockets of knowledge dies one by one,
| recently lot of 3d-design related people mourned closure of
| cgsociety forum.
| tonymet wrote:
| Thanks to exponential growth there are still more websites than
| ever. The issue is indexing and how people consume content.
|
| For a proof of concept try https://wiby.me/ -- which seems to be
| curated more like Yahoo's catalog of yore.
|
| You can find traditional web content we just need more
| applications that index it properly.
|
| The Google index is dominated by SEO-optimized [sic] clickbait
| and social media content is well understood to be low bar.
| tonis2 wrote:
| I have been thinking exact same things sometimes, I want to view
| some random websites, but I don't know many anymore, only some
| tools, which is great, but not exiting.
|
| I think it's cause there's no good Content Management system,
| there's wordpress, it's still very popular, but kind of bloated
| and hard so manage.
|
| I haven't found any Headless CMS, that I could just self host and
| attach the data to my website :/
| gmiller123456 wrote:
| I've made the decision to give up app development and go back to
| plain old webapps. Google's requirement to update the "targetsdk"
| for every app appears to be a "war on free", as only people
| making money off their apps are willing to jump through such
| hoops. I expect the noose to tighten even more as more app
| developers comply. So rather than fight it, I decided to throw in
| the towel early. I expect Google will try to walk a fine line of
| getting the right number of developers to jump ship, but I'd
| expect to see a lot more hobbiests switching back to web
| development in the coming years.
| iamthirsty wrote:
| Tried to load, got:
|
| > Secure Connection Failed
|
| > An error occurred during a connection to www.fromjason.xyz.
| PR_END_OF_FILE_ERROR
|
| In Firefox on Windows.
|
| Oh, the irony.
| Giorgi wrote:
| Social networks absorbed most of them, forums went into groups,
| small corporate websites went into pages and so on.
| aodonnell2536 wrote:
| I agree with many of the sentiments in this article and for the
| past year or so have had curation in the back of my mind when I
| use the Internet.
|
| Yes, the users are on the big tech apps, but the great majority
| of these users aren't interested in niche websites. Many of them
| began using the Internet for leisure/socializing when they
| created their first social media app sometime in the mid 2010s.
| The lack of potential interested users in this space could even
| be a good thing early on.
|
| For those who want to become a link curator, it would be more in
| the spirit of the cause to not use a something like Linktree, but
| rather to self host a minimal site with good discoverability.
| This barrier of entry, though small, may be too much for most
| people however
| nforgerit wrote:
| Not sure what web 3.0 will be fought with but web 4.0 will
| definitely be sticks and stones
| mtillman wrote:
| There are a lot of fun websites. Start here https://ooh.directory
| instead of your App Store.
| emsign wrote:
| What's the point of maintaining a website when the big search
| engines (Google) hides them under tons of SEO crap? You find
| information on social media now. And that's worse than how you
| used to find information in search. I've given up hope for the
| web.
| runamuck wrote:
| An anecdote. I craft a hand written, deliberate technical blog
| and publish monthly. Google tanked my impressions from 3k/
| month to 300 last year. I still churn it out though, I just
| know people won't find me through search any more.
| chasd00 wrote:
| well if genAI begins to replace search and includes citations
| like the hypetrain promises then the SEO/AI-EO race starts all
| over again... so there's that.
| brianzelip wrote:
| What a pleasure reading the article and following the little
| trails! Highly recommended!
| revskill wrote:
| Messing Ads with Search result is just ridiculous of the
| stupidity of human i've seen.
|
| In a decade, i never see any actual useful Ads results to worth
| it.
|
| If you want to show ads, make a dedicated Ads page, and i'll go
| there to browse your Ads, right ?
|
| I go to your search page to search, to save my time, not to waste
| my time to ignore those useless Ads.
| miuramxciii wrote:
| https://anthonybourdain.tumblr.com/about He is still among us
| through his words... such a wonderful soul.
|
| https://anthonybourdain.tumblr.com/
|
| "Yesterday I got a call from the outside world but I said no in
| thunder. I was a dog on a short chain and now there's no chain."
|
| RIP, AB.
| kgdiem wrote:
| I dread the idea of social commerce and the like eclipsing
| individual apps because the support experience from these
| companies is already so poor. I can't even imagine what fresh
| hell could eclipse the walled garden (social media) inside of the
| walled garden (app stores).
|
| I tried to sign up for Facebook to make a business page and was
| instantly banned for no reason. My appeal was denied after
| uploading a picture of myself. It just doesn't make sense from a
| consumer or SMB perspective to continue to promote this path but
| most can't afford not to participate.
|
| Funnily enough though, on New Years Eve 2023 I was talking to a
| few people about a website that I'd made. The only criticism that
| I received was that there was no app... it is a one-time-use
| experience that takes less than 5 minutes, then you never have to
| use it again except to check order status.
|
| But -- going back to "most can't afford not to participate" -- as
| I write this I figure that I might as well relent, make the app
| and start checking into the possibilities with social commerce as
| to not be left behind screaming about an open internet.
| shuntress wrote:
| It is too difficult and dangerous to run a website without
| extremely deep[0] technical knowledge.
|
| Most people who want to create and share things (which is almost
| everyone) need someone else to handle the website for them.
|
| Most companies that will handle a website for you do it under
| condition of implicit exclusivity. Facebook, TikTok, Youtube, etc
| want their moats to be as large as possible and the content they
| publish to be as inaccessible (from outside their silo) as
| possible.
|
| [0]https://xkcd.com/2501/
| jpc0 wrote:
| > It is too difficult and dangerous to run a website without
| extremely deep[0] technical knowledge
|
| Counter point possibly. Squarespace and its lookalikes... Old
| school "php webhosters" generally now have "site builders" that
| are reasonably decent, hell I can buy a wordpress site pre
| setup with a theme that is automatically kept up to date for
| next to nothing, around what I would pay for a filter coffe
| every month.
|
| For a blog do you really need more?
|
| Being a knowledgeable developer I can spin up 10 such sites
| using nginx + some html and CSS and spend about 10 minutes
| every now and then running updates and rebooting for about the
| same price but for the average user generating your own content
| has literally become "click these 5 buttons and begin writing"
| shuntress wrote:
| Squarespace specifically is positioned much more as a
| "website for your business" than for your personal space
| online but they do seem accessible enough.
|
| I think you are still overestimating the average user. Is the
| guy running a pizza shop with pictures of the menu on
| Facebook going to sit through learning about domain name
| registration?
| jpc0 wrote:
| He clearly learnt how to use Facebook, no small feat
| there...
|
| Honestly though someone asked me about developing a
| website, I pointed them at a local provider and they had a
| custom domain + email + a template driven website up in
| literally 5 minutes... They needed to know how to use a
| credit card and a web browser.
|
| Pretty sure there are similar experiences all over, I can't
| really speak for other countries to be fair and I am not
| those places target market. I pay for a VPS and deploy
| whatever I want on it vs the guy that asked me for a
| website who doesn't even know what a domain name is.
|
| There are products for both of us.
| rchaud wrote:
| We all miss the opinionated blog era of the 2000s, but even if
| the Buzzfeed-like aggegator sites that replaced them in the 2010s
| hadn't existed, the blogs were going to die out eventually.
|
| Great blogs were always seasonal, in that the best content posted
| on it was written when the writer was in a particular phase of
| their life. Once that phase passes, the writing dries up. Great
| websites therefore have a start and an end. We should be
| archiving these websites, not telling people to "just post
| anyway" so that the site doesn't disappear from Google Search.
|
| For a Gen Z parallel to this, look to any Reddit thread about how
| some Youtuber they worshipped a decade ago has either disappeared
| or is making low-quality content to pump affilliate links. We
| wouldn't want that happening to our favorite writers of
| yesteryear. There's no shame in calling time on something.
|
| 20 years ago, maddox.xmission.com was my go-to place for rants
| and laughs. The site is still around, but I've changed, so my
| interests are elsewhere. Similarly, I can't expect the site's
| author to still be playing the same character that made me
| bookmark the site all those years ago.
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| Maddox is on threads and appears to be the same person. I on
| the other hand am now a nearly 40yo man with a family and house
| and career, and not the lol-southpark 12 year old I was when he
| started.
| LaurenSerino wrote:
| "Creating content" meant for a platform tends to reduce quality
| to the lowest common denominator of what will work for that
| platform. When the algorithm reigns supreme, there's less
| incentive to try something new. The internet has lost its sense
| of fun creative trial and error.
| blueridge wrote:
| I don't know, I've given up on following people across the web.
| They've all got a sickness that compels them to incessantly
| fidget with their sites: fonts, colors, designs, and About pages
| change almost weekly. And then they babble on about why they made
| those decisions.
|
| It's a garden, a stream, a worry board, a playground. It runs on
| WordPress, now Jekyll, now Hugo, now Ghost. No no, now it's
| "handcrafted" HTML and CSS like the old days.
|
| It's the same psychosis that prevents people from shutting up
| about their note taking system, their ideal journal setup,
| whether they should use a Moleskine or Leuchtturm, yellow or
| white paper, ruled or blank.
|
| I don't see a "cozy" or "small" web of independent minds on the
| Internet. I see a group of anxious and nervous and restless
| people trying in vain to assemble a Self and grasping for meaning
| where there is none.
|
| If you've got a personal website, just leave it the fuck alone.
| rvrs wrote:
| This comment is so mean-spirited... reading it made me sad. I'm
| allowed to own so little in this world, so how I present myself
| online is particularly dear to me. If you don't like my
| website, you can go find others. What does it matter to you?
| blueridge wrote:
| I'm not trying to be mean, I'm just sharing an honest opinion
| and criticizing a widespread behavior that I've noticed. I've
| stopped following people because the "housekeeping" posts
| just kept coming. There's so much focus on digital
| structures, on the means by which they express themselves or
| engage their audience, on the colophon, that they forget to
| make a point or write about anything else.
|
| I'm worn down by this kind of chatter, by the hyper-focus on
| the platforms and the tools instead of the message. It's the
| same thing with designer portfolio pages. They can't get off
| the treadmill and they're constantly tweaking their portfolio
| instead of _settling_ on a good layout and letting their work
| speak for itself.
|
| There's this endless frenetic energy that pushes people to
| search for phrases, labels, names, categories, definitions
| that allow them to rationalize their behavior and justify how
| they're spending time online.
|
| Listen, I'm the OCD type and I'm guilty of this sort of
| thing, too. And every now and then I find myself obsessing
| over tools in a way that's unproductive and I have to stop
| and pull myself out of that headspace. There's an instant
| feedback loop to editing themes, messing with fonts,
| publishing a blog post (that no one will read) and so it's
| easy to keep going. And it's easy to waste a _fuck load of
| time_ doing this sort non-work.
|
| Anyway, I feel like I'm watching the progression of a most
| chronic illness that keeps people _tinkering_ in an anxious
| state of mind, and that makes me sad. It seems unhealthy to
| me, but you can do whatever you want!
| pokoblond wrote:
| This comment is kind of hilarious because I felt similar
| feelings which is why I took down my site!
| blueridge wrote:
| Oh! I remember reading your "On second thought, I don't like
| blogging" post and nodding along. I think I've linked it a
| few times elsewhere in HN comments. We are aligned!
| at_a_remove wrote:
| I cannot speculate as to the magnitude, but I suspect that having
| your blog copied by some spam-type and then them hitting _you_
| for a copyright violation might be a chilling factor.
| davidmurdoch wrote:
| Heroku took them away, or in the least took mine away, when they
| shut down their free tier.
| tech_ken wrote:
| One dynamic that I think contributes to the disappearance of
| websites, but which has maybe a more positive shine than some
| other explanations, is the increasing usage of internet
| technologies to support small social group interaction. Consider
| the hypothetical Jan 1 scenario described by the author: the 2024
| equivalent is seeing a screenshot of a Tweet that reminds you of
| a friend, and then posting it in your groupchat. This type of
| close/closed-circle communication didn't really exist back in the
| 2000-2012 era. Sure chat rooms existed and were popular, but they
| had a very different flavor from the current social forms of a
| group chat or a discord server. I think this turn towards the
| "cozy-net" in the last 5-8 years (a term I'm fuzzily borrowing
| from Venkatesh Rao) means that people are less interested in
| finding weird niche blogs or internet 'locations', hence their
| decline. The internet is now less like cave-diving or
| archaeology, and more like a house party. The space is familiar
| and comfortable, in part because of the "For You" feed, but also
| because the point is to share the space with people you're close
| to. Certainly Instagram profiles have replaced personal blogs,
| which isn't great, but also Instagram messaging has (partly)
| replaced comment sections which TBH is probably better for many
| people's experiences. Anonymous forums can, for all their fun and
| novelty, be hostile and sad places when you get down to it.
| tivert wrote:
| > This type of close/closed-circle communication didn't really
| exist back in the 2000-2012 era. Sure chat rooms existed and
| were popular, but they had a very different flavor from the
| current social forms of a group chat or a discord server.
|
| Wasn't ICQ/AIM/etc. like that during that time period? I missed
| that boat, but that was my impression.
|
| > I think this turn towards the "cozy-net" in the last 5-8
| years (a term I'm fuzzily borrowing from Venkatesh Rao) means
| that people are less interested in finding weird niche blogs or
| internet 'locations', hence their decline.
|
| Does that timeline for that theory make sense? My sense is that
| "websites" started declining as social media platforms took
| off. If I understand the concept correctly the "cozynet" is a
| reaction to and rejection of those platforms.
| tech_ken wrote:
| > Wasn't ICQ/AIM/etc. like that during that time period?
|
| Yes and no. In some ways they were definitely a clear
| precursor, but I think the major difference is mobile. Back
| in the day people would login to AIM after school or
| something, and you'd hang out remotely for some period of
| time, but then one or more of you would actually log-off and
| go about your day in meatspace and the chat would be like
| done for the day. Groupchats and Discord servers are
| literally nonstop, and this is because nobody ever has to get
| up from the computer. I think that this really gives them a
| different character than the old-school chatrooms. AIM was
| like inviting one or two friends over to hang out in your
| room and shoot the shit for a few hours, my Signal groupchat
| is closer to sharing my house with close friends: constant
| chatter, meme-sharing, planning, etc. AIM chat was one
| activity that your friend group would do among other things
| (like going to the bar together), whereas groupchats in some
| ways can really define the friend group itself. This isn't
| universal, people were definitely using AIM to define the
| limits of their friend group or were always online, but I
| think the experience was far less common than it is today.
| For most people (that I knew) AIM was closer to a party phone
| line, rather than the central forum for all communication and
| interaction.
|
| > Does that timeline for that theory make sense?
|
| That's a good point, and yeah I definitely think you're
| correct that coziness is a reaction to/recreation of the "old
| web". However I do think that coziness was present in early
| social media platforms in a way that like Rao doesn't really
| acknowledge. My romance with my now spouse kicked off in a
| large part through FB interaction, and there were plenty of
| ways that we could create privacy/coziness even on a large
| platform that didn't explicitly support that. But yeah, maybe
| it would be more accurate to say that "socialness" killed
| websites, and that coziness is the currently dominant form of
| socialness?
|
| edit: on that second point I would also say that "coziness"
| is maybe a reason that the reaction to big platforms didn't
| cut back towards websites, and instead has focused on the
| chatroom/messaging paradigm.
| gexla wrote:
| People just don't think of the world in terms of finding their
| people. Work? Find people doing cool things. Internet? Find
| people writing about or doing cool things. Friends? Find cool
| people to hang out with. Dating? Find cool people to... (none of
| my business.)
|
| Instead, it's all about job applications, swiping right,
| scrolling the algos, etc. Nobody thinks in terms of people.
|
| My list isn't even websites. It's people, and whatever ways I can
| follow or contact them.
| bloppe wrote:
| Once upon a time, people installed applications. You installed
| skype. You installed AIM. You installed iTunes. You installed
| Microsoft Office.
|
| Now, you go to zoom.com, or messenger.com, or open.spotify.com,
| or docs.google.com. You don't have to install and constantly
| update desktop apps because you can load an always-up-to-date
| webpage in 500 milliseconds. PWAs have access to desktop
| notifications, serial ports, your local filesystem, etc. They can
| do everything desktop apps can. With WASM, they can even handle
| high-performance workloads. The web is just a better way to
| distribute software.
|
| IMO, operating systems should go all-in on web apps. ChromeOS
| basically does that. The capyloon project [1] aims to do that for
| mobile devices. There should be no downloadable apps. "App
| stores" should just be CDNs. Browser caching can enable offline
| use. There's no technical reason why the web can't be just as
| user-friendly as downloadable apps. It's just culture.
|
| And, hopefully making the web more usable would also soften the
| power of the platform silos.
|
| [1]: https://capyloon.org/
| rimliu wrote:
| There is no technical reason we can't eat soup with a fork.
| It's just culture.
| jmclnx wrote:
| There is Gemini and it seems to be filling in that niche. Plenty
| of sites there you can explore.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)
|
| Just go to these places and from there you can find many more
| sites from people who are on sdf.
|
| gemini://gem.sdf.org/
|
| gemini://sdf.org/
| tasty_freeze wrote:
| The world keeps turning and it can be shocking when what was once
| a comfortable way of doing things, so comfortable you just take
| it for granted, suddenly becomes passe. A couple others things
| come to mind, not just personal websites.
|
| I used to like giving CDs to friends and family at Christmas:
| here is some music that you might like that you probably don't
| know about. I'm sure it was a frog in a boiling pot phenomenon,
| but it seemed to happen all at once: the recipients all said,
| "Thanks, but I don't have a CD player."
|
| The same thing with app development -- people want to click a
| link and immediately start interacting and not need to install
| anything. I've written a few emulators for old computers that
| weren't popular to begin with, which already limits the audience
| to a handful of people who care at all. Even among that narrow
| selection of people who visit my sites, probably 95% of them
| can't be bothered to download and install an emulator, and I get
| it. It would be a fun exercise rewriting them to be web apps, but
| the inability to seamlessly save/restore disk images to the
| user's space really harms the experience.
|
| Anyway, I have to attend to my guestbooks and curate a webring.
| yyyfb wrote:
| > here's the bad news-- we are the ones who vanished, and I
| suspect what we really miss are the joys of discovery
|
| Yes, we vanished, because algorithmic curation is overall a lot
| more effective. We may be nostalgic of the craftsmanship that
| came with old school curation, but it's not coming back any more
| than we moving out of cities to return to a agrarian life.
|
| EXCEPT MAYBE that algorithmic curation is expensive, and
| advertising revenue can only cover a certain amount before
| turning people off. High interest rates as well as growth
| slowdown will cause a reckoning, in the next few years, of these
| costs - and I expect that in some areas we will see a return to
| traditional curation.
| dyeje wrote:
| I couldn't help but read the title to the tune of Where Have All
| the Cowboys Gone by Paula Cole.
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