Where Have All the Websites Gone?

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.

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.

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.

Nah. 4chan's reputation is entirely deserved.

Nah. 4chan's reputation is entirely undeserved.

See? I can also make claims without any arguments whatsoever.

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.

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."

But you can still post racism inside /b/?

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.

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.

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.

Oh, you took me literally too! So weird!

What evidence would it take to change your mind?

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.

That's funny. I'll be here still waiting on hearing which evidence will change your mind. :)

The other user is correct, your style of discussion is obnoxious, and is not contributing anything useful to the discussion.

What are you trying to achieve here, exactly? Did something trigger you to start behaving in this way?

The question, "What evidence would change your mind?" is perfectly reasonable.

It's a proxy for "Does your response to this topic involve trapped-priors?" Most people aren't willing to reveal or acknowledge they have trapped-priors and so it jumps to the end of the conversation where they simply leave. It's saves my time discussing topics by avoiding interactions with close-minded people.

Nobody intelligent. Where you fall on that spectrum is your problem.

Strictly speaking, “That is idiotic” does apply to the argument, as written in the quote. It’s not a personal insult, it’s a characterization of the quality of the argument.

I suppose the rules are trying to say that you should avoid such characterizations, but that’s a dubious rule.

Would it be ok to praise the quality of the argument? If so, it should be ok to criticize it as well. Not all arguments are as clear cut as 1+1=2, and there are other criteria by which arguments can be evaluated.

The purpose of the phrase "this is idiotic" isn't to inform, but to insult. It contains no useful information whatsoever.

Would it be ok to praise the quality of the argument? If so, it should be ok to criticize it as well.

Why would the former imply the latter? It is ok to give gifts to people, but not to steal from them.

It contains no useful information whatsoever.

It’s a claim about the nature of an argument. Do you believe it’s not possible for an argument to be idiotic?

Why would the former imply the latter?

Because restricting speech that’s critical leads to a degradation of the quality of dialog.

Idiotic arguments exist. So do spurious arguments, disingenuous arguments, bad arguments, pointless arguments, dishonest arguments, and so on. Which of those adjectives would you like to ban when discussing the quality of an argument?

It's a claim about the nature of an argument. Do you believe it's not possible for an argument to be idiotic?

No, I believe that an argument is either valid or invalid. Any other characteristic is meaningless in pursuit of truth.

Consider the meaning of the term "idiotic": something that only an idiot would say. Therefore, "that is idiotic" means "that is something that only an idiot would say", which in turn implies that the person saying it is an idiot.

Idiotic arguments exist. So do spurious arguments, disingenuous arguments, bad arguments, pointless arguments, dishonest arguments, and so on. Which of those adjectives would you like to ban when discussing the quality of an argument?

The only one I'd like to ban is "idiotic", since it's the only one that insults the person. "Dishonest" is a little tricky, since it's hard to prove someone's intentions or honesty, but depending on the context it might be okay. All the other adjectives are only describing the quality of the argument, without insulting the person - and while meaningless by themselves (what does "bad argument" mean?), I'd consider them fine to be used, as long as further elaboration is included.

Some examples of other adjectives I'd ban are "retarded", "stupid", "foolish", "lazy", "malicious", since they all insult a person or imply bad motivations, without providing any information.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Which variety of wojak spam do you find most insightful?

You're being neither clever nor insightful here.

If only you’d considered this yourself before posting.

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).

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.

"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).

Arguably, there have been a good number of wars (ostensibly) over books (in particular religious texts seem to do the trick), whereas we are yet to declare war over any form of web content.

People tried the latter a number of times already. Then the activism at US unis happened; first, about a decade or a bit more ago, lefties not only stuffed books with trigger warnings, but fought (and in a few cases successfully) for books to be banned from universities because they made them feel "unwell". Then, as if copying them, right-wingers tried the same in recent years. It's a shit culture, that's what.

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).

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.

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.

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.

There were plenty of ways to have a website without writing any HTML and without running your own server even 20 years ago.

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.

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.

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.

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.*".

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/old-reddit-redirec...

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

Where do the aol users fit? Part of the early app crowd?

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.

A proto-FaceGramTok

I love it. Though FaceTokGram rolls off the tongue easier.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

Video game mod sites are highly political. You can’t get away with anything that would have been fine in the year 2007.

There’s no debate any more, just banning and shadow banning. Forums used to be spicy! Now they are nothing but toxic positivity or bland nothingness.

There are still "spicy" fourms.

how do i get in there?

You don't. If you could, the FBI could. You would have to be introduced by a friend who's in it.

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

X/Twitter still supports anonymous accounts right?

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).

Smartphones ruined the web and are ruining life in general.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

How is that related to other browsers not getting an extension?

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.

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

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.

I swear that IKEA filter writeup was on HN once upon a time. That or someone else's thorough analysis of the exact same appliance!

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.

That looks great. Is there a list of these types of sites?

An aggregator aggregator? Then you run into issues of "what constitutes an aggregator site" coupled with "... that deserves being on the list".

cloudhiker just took me to a delightful site. Fun rewarding experience, will prob never use it again.

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.

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.

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.

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".

This site has seemingly solved both of those problems. So isn't HN the modern StumbleUpon, albeit with more focus on technical topics?

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.

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?

Did you use StumbleUpon? There was very little overlap, it was a completely different part of the internet; more actual "web" than "just uses the internet for transport"

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

I miss Stumbleupon and discoverability. I despise the me-shaped bubble that I'm forced to occupy on the current, broken internet.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There's also the stigma of being a web only platform in the view of the younger users.

"Apps" in this contexts means "Platforms" or a "Closed" web vs the "Open" web.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

It's not uncommon for lightly trafficked sites to have 90% or more of their resources taken up by bots of various kinds. Remember Google isn't the only search engine and there are many crawlers that aren't search engines at all.

> 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).

Re StumbleUpon: you might be interested in the "random page" feature of wiby.me: https://wiby.me/surprise/

I believe you are missing the crucial reason why all the people are consuming content in apps now.

Google is in large part to blame for this, if not the main reason.

Many years ago, Google started updating their search algorithm to heavily prefer specific domains like govs, edus, or handpicked ones like Reuters or Microsoft.

I used to run my own blog and forum, and it used to be on the top of the search results for the niche it occupied. After the changes, it fell off the front pages and I'd often see the top search result being a link to a random reddit comment mentioning the search phrase and no other content.

It was at that point I realized that there was no point in running your own website to create "content". You can't compete with domains whitelisted by Google unless you have a lot of money to spend on SEO.

Some people point to the "Panda" update as when this all started happening.

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.

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.

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.

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.

" 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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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".

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.

Yes, they did, even if they were reading pulp novels and not classic literature.

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.

There is pretty reliable data that says people read less today. It's not just the "parents complain about their kids" fallacy.

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.

Video? How quaint. Why not simply translate the latent representation of concepts.

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 über 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.

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.

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.

Just commenting on your timelines. They are a bit on the short side considering the rapid pace of technology.

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.

I think if you asked people under the age of thirty what they prefer, 90% are going to choose video over books.

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.

Definitely I think younger people prefer TikTok cooking videos to bloated recipe websites.

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?

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?

You may want https://search.marginalia.nu/

It gets mentioned here on HN quite a lot.

Wow. I see this as proof web surfing died because the Big Search Engines prefer to promote commercial entities over individual interests.

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.

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.

As for your first question, they do that with local search.

But, also as an answer to your first question, no, there is no money in this that will show up on the next quarters income sheet.

As it is, the biggest way to deal with Google is regulations of breaking up search engines and ad networks. As long as Google controls the money making on the internet they'll be near unbeatable.

There are other problems as well. Popularity based rankings feed into themselves over time, creating the sort of extreme pareto distribution in popularity we see today where like a solid dozen of enormous websites get almost all of the traffic.

Yeah, this has been my thesis from the beginning, and the Marginalia search engine is basically constructed to verify this hypothesis. It's easy to dismiss such a notion when it's just words. It's much harder to brush off a more tangible demonstration.

Really missing a way to sort by recency, that would make it far more useful for me.

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...

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.

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.

Are you sure that's the correct URL? That site is a near-default Wordpress site with a single Hello World post from 2018.

I believe he means to say https://wiby.me

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 ;)

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

Agreed that SEO garbage has made it very hard to find good websites

Have you heard of https://www.marginalia.nu/ in general, and especially the https://search.marginalia.nu/ from there?

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

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

But what about this is TikTok specific? Google and Facebook have done the exact same thing for ages.

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.

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.

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.

Is TikTok even "Web"? I bet 99% of its userbase have never used it on the Web.

These version numbers are for marketing. None of them are revolutionary, only the web itself is.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There is a distinct difference between Web 2.0 (think wikis, blogs) and the social-media paradigm that followed since ~2012-13.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

S. P. Somtow nailed this 43 years ago in _Mallworld_. It's completely confusing to me also.

Wow, I never heard of that, sounds like I need that on my kindle ASAP. Thanks!

After long and boozy night? It might as well be Tuesday :)

For you, that was the worst hangover of your life. For me, it was Tuesday.

Too many nitpickers nowadays too.

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.

have you seen https://ooh.directory ?

Hadn't looked since it launched, wow it's looking very healthy! Here's my listing there https://ooh.directory/blog/96nwv6/

have you seen https://curlie.org ?

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?

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.

We could automate the link posting process. Here is a thought, create a form which accepts the input of link details, stores in some place and ur website reads and displays from there. Submitting a form could be simpler and can be done from any device.

I have mine! https://sancoderr.netlify.app/links/

Here's mine: https://mglz.de/links.html

I just wanted to say that I recently went back to using my RSS feed as a main source of news, and your TILs have been one of the first additions to it. Appreciate it!

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.

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.

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.?

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.

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.

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.

I will give this a try. Thanks!

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.

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.

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.

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

Tip: ublock origin on PC, vivaldi browser on android. No more ads

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.

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.

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

And the few pages that stop working probably weren't good for your time management anyway.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I think you’re right. It is likely never going to happen.

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.

it is the centralisation of visitor count widgets, guestbooks and web-rings on geocities

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.

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.

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?

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!

I've noticed the same behavior in myself, but I think the explanation is simpler than needing to dive into existential philosophy; our tools suck, and we haven't found the right combination of features to make a nice simple software system that people can use for their daily lives.

I still think something like Emacs or Leo is the way forward, the UI/UX just needs to be massively improved.

https://leoeditor.com/preface.html

This comment is kind of hilarious because I felt similar feelings which is why I took down my site!

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!

I'm quite surprised and honored that my words resonated :) since that post I've been living a more quiet, private, and a bit more happier life.

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

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.

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

There's been a growing pushback against Fandom (tm), with contributors to quite a few Fandom(tm) wikis moving back to a self-hosted MediaWiki instance. The Minecraft Wiki (https://minecraft.wiki) is a major example.

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.

Great point imo, not an easy point to make given how altruistic wiki is generally seen.

Another angle is Google's algo making people too scared to link out to other sites which was happening around the early 00's.

This is a really good point.

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.

It's also hard to stick around when the website doesn't implement HTTPS and is insecure.

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"?

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...

But what is its mission?

just for fun - something to do with my digital ocean droplet. it's actually down now since i deleted the droplet and am planning on buying a VPS. probably won't run an imageboard tho.

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.

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

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.

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)

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.

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.

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

Sorry. No. Tell him something about ergonomics and bad contrast. That color-scheme is a NO-GO.

I somehow suspect that the poor contrast and readability are part of the aesthetic he's going for.

That's all well and good for him, but not for me.

First impression of that site: WTF?! Trying to scroll, have a bright red scroll-bar. WADDYA DOIN' WIFF MY BROWSA, DUDE?!

Trying to make sense of the text, having to squint. Switching off uBlock (benefit of doubt, etc.), to see if it messes with some JS/CSS. No joy.

Don't care.

Tab closed.

Done.

Love it, colorscheme and all. It's very legible for me.

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/

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"

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?

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.

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.

Evil Mad Scientist have a monthly (well, maybe not every month) link post.

https://www.evilmadscientist.com

Hey! What a cool collection of links. It's a perfect HN rabbit hole!

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.

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.

It also creates a world of nearly unlimited consumption, and the majority of the userbase is on the consumption side, not the publishing side.

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.

Exept of cause that it creates a bunch of giant for profit gatekeepers manipulating the content stream for maximum profit(for the gatekeeper).

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)

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)

From the thread: https://dm.hn still going

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?”

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.

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.

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.

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.

I always disliked forums. With the groups very tight nit, elitist, and only referring to some garbage search function.

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.

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.

meh++

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Beer is one way out ...

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.

Yeah it does feel like all the websites have gone, it only the static ones

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

I used to love a site called 'Stumble Upon' that would take you to random interesting websites. Those were the days.

Not exactly the same, but the spirit is similar: https://indieblog.page/

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.

This is where I'm at, too. The overhead of getting a mobile app up and distributed is extremely heavy and distracting.

I have taken a look at hyperview and tried it out. That's probably the only way I'll ever do another mobile app.

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/

There is no technical reason we can't eat soup with a fork. It's just culture.

See the same sentiment from Marginalia : https://www.marginalia.nu/log/79-ikea-offramp/

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.

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.

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.

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.

They still show up at Kottke (curated) and Metafilter (community) from time to time.

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

Heker

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.

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 :/

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.

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.

Here's the list of indie web resources to I follow:

https://untested.sonnet.io/Places+to+Find+Indie+Web+Content

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.

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.

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.

Not sure what web 3.0 will be fought with but web 4.0 will definitely be sticks and stones

There are a lot of fun websites. Start here https://ooh.directory instead of your App Store.

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.

Archived version if anyone needs it: https://archive.is/5sxo8

I feel like hacker news is the curated content that the author wants, at least for technology.

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.

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/

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.

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.

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/

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.

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.

2086© (so I don't forget to change the year)

I love this guy.

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.

I couldn’t help but read the title to the tune of Where Have All the Cowboys Gone by Paula Cole.

social media ate them

social media ate it

Heroku took them away, or in the least took mine away, when they shut down their free tier.

What a pleasure reading the article and following the little trails! Highly recommended!

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.

Really enjoyed the post, the recommended sites and the authors general website

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.

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

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/

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.

unrelated to the post but this website is dope <3

"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.

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?"...

Social networks absorbed most of them, forums went into groups, small corporate websites went into pages and so on.

I'm going to start writing more, again. I'm definitely stealing this one, “2086© (so I don't forget to change the year) From Jason.”

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.

"Because it's still out there, we just have to find it."

With search engines operated by advertising companies, or companies that profit from advertising. there is an incentive to actively prevent discovery and hide what is not profitable.

Search "too fast" on Google and draw a ban. Even when this is public information being searched; it does not belong to Google.

Facilitating discovery by web users is against Big Tech interests.

Big Tech will do the "discovery"; relax and consume what is presented. Want to go deep into results. Not so fast.

According to Big Tech, what's actually online is not your business. Only what Big Tech wants to show you matters.

What's actually online beyond this might be mostly garbage,^1 but the public is actively prevented from discovering that fact.

At least, they won't discover it via Big Tech intermediation.

Maybe it's not all garbage. But how would anyone know. The advertising company sits in the middle, controlling what can and cannot be discovered.

1. Not advertising garbage but another kind that has no utility for advertising.

Don't believe me. Read some zone files, starting with the com.zone. There are milllions of websites that have become all but impossible to discover via Big Tech intermediation of the web.