Comment by rchaud | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rchaud | Hacker News Reader

The type of site the author is discussing began to disappear around the time "blogs" entered normal people's vocabulary, and the commercialization of Internet content really began. I remember the 2004 US Pres election being all about "the hottest blogs", which had Washington insider information the major media outlets didn't have. Once "blogging" became a business (ad-supported), quality collapsed as the KPIs were now pageviews and clickthroughs.

This caused a a shift away from creating content for content's sake. 15 years ago, someone may have posted an in-depth technical article for no other reason than to share knowledge. Now, that article would be posted on Medium.com in a gimped form, as a lead-in to their 10-hour video course on that topic.

The early period of Twitter briefly brought the "weird web" back, but once brands and businesses descended upon it, it became all about retweets and follower counts. Quality nosedived as a result.

The blogs of old are still there, I mean, this article even links to a few. They are just really hard to find, and that’s the problem.

The internet didn’t stop being interesting, HN is a great example of this in action. The blog article about rejected Disney princesses is likely the most interesting piece anyone of us read on the internet today.

Only Google didn’t deliver it, a HN link to an article about the creative net did. I say google, but really, any of the gape keepers is equally guilty.

Interestingly I think all the gate keepers are at a place that yahoo, AOL and others where when google disrupted them.

So maybe, just maybe, we’ll see the dawn of something better soon.

I immediately though of HN-style sites too. What we need is some sort of gumbo made from spanning all of these specialized , human-curated sites, stripping out the Alexa top 100, 1000, top-whatever sites and then re-ordering the results by some new measure that encapsulates "neatness", "quirky" or "weirdness", or what ever we can call it.

This sounds really hard, and for me I don't know where I'd start, but I also didn't create google or pagerank which at it's dawn also seemed like magic, so I have faith this could be done.

It's the sort of mission to which I could dedicate my life, until I too was corrupted by the success and lure of endless wealth, at which point today-me sincerely hopes some other smart oblivious kids would come along and displace me.

So I too hope to see something better in my lifetime.

For the same reasons I like to browse Mastodon, and spend time on the deep web. It's not that quality content doesn't exist anymore, it's just drowned out by the crap.

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