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Comment by simonh | Hacker News Reader

I see this sentiment mentioned often, but all the things we could do back in the day are not only still possible, they are actually still being done by people out there.

What has happened is that, whereas 10 years ago we would individually spend the time to track down these communities and niche sites, nowadays we can't be bothered and just go to Youtube or Facebook. That's on us though.

Fortunately, in my experience niche sites and communities are still thriving through social transmission, and the fact that so many more people are active online nowadays.

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How would you track them down today? In the old days, you typed "knitting" into Lycos and you got this wonderfully weird site of someone for whom knitting was a passion, along with a webring full of similar sites.

Today, everything is hyper-optimized SEO for maximum ad views run by a huge faceless corporation. How do you discover anything good in that noise?

My only hope at this point is Neocities.

This is my problem as well. I'm tried using millionshort, obscure duckduckgo searches that exclude a lot of the big sites, and they still don't show up.

Those who wonder how these niche sites looked like, and example: http://www.mir.com.my/rb/photography/ This site has an immense amount of data in a reading-friendly format about old, obscure, beautiful photography equipment, in a way I've not seen for decades. Why? Because it hasn't been updated since 2005. And it just works.

> How would you track them down today?

You go and find an appropriate subreddit.

Seriously. Subreddits are mini-Internets. Yes, centrally controlled and restricted to newsboard format (the latter is arguably a benefit), but they link out to interesting sites on the "main" Internet, and mostly haven't been poisoned by marketers just yet.

Not an elegant solution, and not a permanent solution - but it works for now.

It doesn't work very well, though. They're still at the mercy of reddit's advertisers.

It can be a good way to find additional resources though. Asking questions or looking at posts often can yield many more interesting sources.

But what if I want to search knitting to find out how to knit, not to revel in quirk culture?

The "authentic" people are on Youtube and Reddit and Medium and publishing on Twitter and closed Facebook groups. And yet, some of those people sometimes want to make a living on their passion. I would be willing to bet most people on the web in the 90s would have as well, if they could have.

There is more hobby and enthusiast content on the web now than there ever has been, with more depth, greater quality and dimensionality than the 90's web could ever have hoped to offer, as well as far more opportunities for interaction between people. I think that's a fair trade for nostalgia and "quirk."

(Edited for less snark and more clarity since it seems this comment is getting sniped.)

It's a result of things getting worse. In an effort to stop abuse and increase drive to sponsored creators, YouTube committed a cardinal sin with respect to their discovery algorithm. They made things worse.

Discovery on YouTube is now comically difficult, getting out of your filter bubble means making bizarre searches and filter edge cases, otherwise you see the same 15 videos weekly.

They've failed to filter the hate content they intended to eliminate, they've failed to improve their curated content volume, and discovery remains bound and gagged in the back of Ad monetization's sedan.

If you were here in 2010 it's worse now. Privacy / safety / predictability, I guess, but the magic is all gone.

YouTube could use an [adult swim] concept. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. YouTube.

If I needed to track down such a site I would try asking in person. Find a local knitting meetup and ask everyone there. Then go to the next city over and do the same thing. Hopefully you will bump into someone who knows someone who knows about that awesome knitting site.

And that sucks.

Thanks for the pointer to Neocities.

Knitters have their own website/culture. It’s got it’s own message boards and social networking. Its calles ravelry.

https://www.ravelry.com/about

It’s a good model for other craft sites.

"knitting -youtube" should remove quite large part of the results...

> That's on us though.

I'd like people to stop harping on "individual responsibility". It's not "on us". We are social monkeys, we are not perfectly rational autonomous individuals. Monopolies are emerging from collective behaviour that can't be subsumed into the simple aggregation of random personal choices.

Fair enough, but it's not really on Youtube that it's users are all a bunch of social monkeys that are too lazy to use other services alongside it, either.

Ook!

Okay, so what are some niche video sites you can recommend?

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