I love these stupid fun projects. There's no commercial motivation, no shady manipulation: it's just _fun_.
'Whimsical' is the word that I think best describes it. I love the whimsy of it. I wish more of the internet was like this.
'Whimsical' is the word that I think best describes it. I love the whimsy of it. I wish more of the internet was like this.
It used to be.
I'm am old pre-WWW guy. We had a lot of whimsy, "back in the day."
Then serious money started to happen, and that changed everything.
It's not all bad -at all. I think a lot of modern stuff is very cool, and I'm glad folks are making money on this, as it helps with that ol' "rising tide lifts all boats" thing.
But I do sort of miss the "dorky" whimsy (I wonder if anyone remembers "Kill Dean's Inits!"). The current IT scene is fairly cutthroat and deadly serious.
But sure, the percentage is probably lower.
That says to me that this is a search problem. Could we build a search engine that favors indie/personal labors of love over commercial sites?
Or maybe it's a curation problem rather than search. In which case a site like HN is just the thing to help it bubble to the surface.
(As an aside, at a work meeting last week, someone used the term home page to refer to a web page and I was instantly transported to 1995. I remember one upper level manager excitedly declare that the term home page should only refer to the page that opens when you start the browser and not to the page that we had at our companies main address.)
Wow. I'd forgotten all about him/her (probably him).
I love that they're hosted on their own websits, too. Like the hamsterdance and other stupid things from the 90s.
So much fun stuff nowadays is just memes on Reddit, fb or other social networks. They're still fun, but they close the gardens one joke at a time. Can you imagine how much less conformity there would be if even 10% of fb users also had fun on their own website or self-hosted blog?