[HN Gopher] The Revenge of the Home Page
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The Revenge of the Home Page
Author : tysone
Score : 50 points
Date : 2024-05-01 19:18 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.newyorker.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.newyorker.com)
| skilled wrote:
| https://archive.is/PkwVY
| blisstonia wrote:
| Thanks!
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| > _instead of passively waiting for social feeds to serve you
| what to read, you can seek out reading materials_
|
| or even use RSS to get the best of both worlds?
|
| Lagniappe: https://search.marginalia.nu
| lagniappe wrote:
| Uh, thanks, but how did you know I was gonna be reading this?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| I presume they mean "by way of good measure", not tagging
| your username.
| croisillon wrote:
| TIL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagniappe
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40220793
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40210065
| skilled wrote:
| Internet was still an alien thing to a lot of people throughout
| the 2000s, and if you think about it - that's only 14 years ago!
| And look at this article - it's reflecting on the good old days
| as though it happened thousands of years ago.
|
| Yes, the problem definitely lies in social media and its evil
| attention-grabbing algorithms, but the fact that people never got
| to experience the old-school Internet also plays a role in this.
| People just don't know any better!
|
| For a lot of folks, the web is merely a source of news, a means
| to pay bills, and to engage in mindless short-form entertainment.
|
| I am all for bringing back individual sites and communities back
| tho!
|
| Is money the real root problem of this? Not just from an
| advertising perspective but also from the perspective of a
| person.
|
| Fundamentally, the Internet provides freedom of communication
| with the entire world, but these days we can hardly engage with
| that world because the ability to support oneself financially
| comes first. As such, you either don't spend a lot of time
| online, or you spend your entire time online chasing the
| cheddar...
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| > I am all for bringing back individual sites and communities
| back tho!
|
| And if you do find a community you like, make sure you support
| it financially. Hosting isn't free and banner ads don't pay
| like they used to.
| JJMcJ wrote:
| Now if RSS would just make a comeback it would be a new Golden
| Age.
| MrVandemar wrote:
| It never went away.
| giantrobot wrote:
| The issue with RSS is it is tied to the "long form" blog
| model* where a post requires a subject line. Most RSS readers
| do not do a great job displaying posts with no title. They
| also don't typically do anything with inline hash tags
| (inside the body content). With Facebook/Twitter/Etc (short
| form content) there's a very informal text box. Hash tags get
| processed inline with the body. It makes posting something
| incredibly low friction. A blog post that will actually show
| up correctly in an RSS reader has much higher friction.
| Boosting a blog post (reTweet or equivalent) is also high
| friction.
|
| Blogging never went away and blog hosts exist but "Social
| Media" style short form content exploded because it's low
| formality and low friction. Other features like direct
| messaging or posting picture and video are done online in the
| apps.
|
| A lot of early effort with that sort of stuff on blogs died
| early because it requires not just support in the blogging
| engine, but moderation/administration done by the owner of
| the blog and support inside the RSS software.
|
| * long form might only be a sentence
| yallpendantools wrote:
| Sorry for the pedantry. I agree wholeheartedly with the thought
| of your comment but your timeline rubs me off.
|
| > Internet was still an alien thing to a lot of people
| throughout the 2000s
|
| I agree but...
|
| > and if you think about it - that's only 14 years ago
|
| 14 years ago is 2010 which is no longer 2000s. It could be _the
| end of_ 2000s, but that 's pushing it.
|
| And it bothers me because by 2010 I don't think the Internet
| was "new" or "alien" at the time to anyone other than business
| bureaucrats or out-of-touch politicians[1]. The algorithmic
| news feed has been recognized as a problem by then[2].
|
| I'd say 2010 was the time when the Internet was starting to
| become ubiquitous, the transition period between the good old
| days and the age of walled-garden platforms we have to day. For
| more context, the iPhone---whose form factor, at least, put the
| Internet in everyone's pockets---was released in 2007 and in
| 2010 Google released the Nexus line for Android.
|
| [1] In 2013, Angela Merkel was ridiculed for calling the
| Internet "uncharted territory".
|
| [2] https://archive.is/m8pjM Article written in 2017 but the
| pertinent part is "Facebook says its own researchers have been
| studying the filter bubble since 2010".
| tsavo wrote:
| While message boards and irc still exist and could be
| considered "echo chambers", social media began kicking off in
| mid-2000s with their algorhythmic echo chambers.
|
| Also around this time period was growth in blogging, further
| pulling people away from homepages to "personal pages". Even
| in the days of Geocities, many people would hit a homepage
| prior to potentially visiting their own site.
|
| And while smart phones did play a role in the trend, changes
| to web browsers on PC devices with their own "start pages"
| with news/content operating as pseudo-homepages further
| contributed to the shift for non-smartphone users.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I went the opposite way and put my personal websites behind a
| login. It's the only way I could think of to protect my sites
| from being scraped and used to train LLMs.
|
| I hope a better solution comes around, though. I want to have
| my sites available again.
| cal85 wrote:
| > Then Twitter imploded
|
| What does imploded mean here?
| rickmode wrote:
| In context, this means "self-inflicted harm".
| brigadier132 wrote:
| Yeah I understand why you are confused but the article is
| alternative history fiction, just wasn't labelled as such.
| surfingdino wrote:
| Early social media (MySpace, Twitter, Facebook) was a free
| alternative to paying someone to run, patch, and scale your own
| website/blog. It gave a lot of people opportunity to create their
| own communities and engage with them in a more convenient and
| immediate way than blogs or forums. The fun lasted for as long as
| free VC money was there and when that ran out they all went
| downhill. I am removing my social media posts, closing accounts,
| and going back to a website with a blog. Instagram, Twitter, and
| the rest of them are the new MySpace near its end days, they can
| run on fake accounts and bullshit content for a while, but
| advertisers will eventually learn that the audiences have gone
| elsewhere. That other place won't be another social media
| network, because spammers, bot devs, and mass-manufacturers of
| crap content are so well prepared that they can start flooding
| any new platform with their digital manure almost immediately.
| debian3 wrote:
| The fun lasted for as long as free VC money was there and when
| that ran out they all went downhill.
|
| I feel that's where we are with ai at the moment. I guess at
| some point they will answer withs ads
| surfingdino wrote:
| Yes. It will go downhill even faster, because AI has a
| problem of not providing anything of value that would
| generate a network effect to attract users and keep them on
| site. With social media there was peer pressure to join and
| stay, with AI there is none of that.
| hcarvalhoalves wrote:
| The "home page" is the digital version of the "front page" from
| newspapers, or the magazine format. It worked then, and it will
| keep working.
|
| In contrast, Twitter and the like is the equivalent to random
| people shouting on the street.
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(page generated 2024-05-01 23:02 UTC)