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Comment by marginalia_nu | Hacker News Reader

All the fun and weird stuff is still around, it just typically doesn't SEO well and doesn't show up on Google, and is too long-tail to show up on popularity-based algorithms like those of Reddit or Facebook.

I've spent the last year or so building tools and algorithms specifically to dig up "fun and weird". It's still there: https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/random

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There's still something to be said about the fact that all the mainstream internet platforms don't really encourage much in terms of "internet creativity" outside of the tight boundaries that are allowed (uploading a video, writing text, posting a picture, etc)

The fact that MySpace was mainstream and allowed for HTML/CSS hacking did exactly what the article said -- it tricked a generation of teenagers into learning how to do that "weird internet stuff."

For the most part, if you want to do anything like that now you're gonna be stuck figuring out domains and hosting and whatnot which isn't nearly as fun as typing some HTML into the platform you and your friends already use. So not as many people are going to do it.

The good thing about MySpace, which was arguably also its weakness to Facebook, was that you weren't forced to use a real name. You could create multiple accounts, multiple identities, let your freak flag fly. Facebook/Instagram are so tied to people's real lives that you don't just have to filter yourself, you basically have to construct a false happy life for public display.

That's the direction the internet has been moving in general, and naïve people are getting on-board with the corporate sales pitch that removing anonymity from the internet enables us to catch pedophiles or nazis or something.

Police state utopia!

MySpace was my first coding experience and I think ultimately tipped me to CS in school.

I remember laying out my page like a pink and black newspaper. All that work for no one to read lol.

But now it is essentially my career

Excellent site - thank you!

Perhaps it is the way we think about the internet that has also changed...

Back in the day, when I wanted to find something on the internet, I knew I was going to have to dig and search and explore. My mind expected this experience.

Since web 2.0, my mind doesn't work the same way.

I wonder if there's a search engine that ranks results with worst SEOs first

It's not that far off what my search engine does.

Awesome. I think there's a huge need for a search engine filtering out commercial content. It's basically just all spam.

Recently I wanted to find information on hacking a device I had obtained - but of course any search query I could throw at search engines only yielded ways to buy it or low-effort reviews. I tried marginalia but it seems like the index wasn't quite large enough for my purpose yet.

May well be that what you were looking for is in the index. My algorithms have a lot of potential for improvement. Right now they only really work well for broad topical searches. They are also entirely blind to some fairly rich websites, such as certain types of forums.

Consider trying Kagi. (I first started using it while it was still in closed beta, but I am not otherwise affiliated with them. I am very satisfied with it so far.)

I also used it during its beta phase and found it rather unremarkable. What really kept me from seriously considering it is that the account requirements prevents using it anonymously.

Precisely. It isn't fun or weird because YOU aren't fun or weird. If you were fun or weird you'd already know where all the fun and weird stuff is.

Another aspect is that your view of the internet, which on its own is incomprehensibly large, is largely shaped by the tools you use to interact with it. It's difficult to become aware of just how much your choice of internet gateway will shape your view of what exists.

If your primary mechanism is Hacker News, the internet is going to look like it's dominated by a bunch of startups and open source projects.

If your primary mechanism is Twitter, the internet is going to be dominated by big-name thought leaders, there will appear to be a lot of outrage and inflamed conflict, maybe some culture wars stuff will stay on your radar.

If your primary mechanism is Google, then a bunch of huge websites are going to be extremely prominent: Wikipedia, Goodreads, WebMD, Pinterest, Stackoverflow, etc. It's also going to look like every blog is just a bunch of spam.

If your primary mechanism is Facebook, then the web will look like a bunch of tabloid news articles, try-hard viral videos, minions memes.

and so on and so forth.

My navigator tends to remember the websites I view more, which are mostly communities, and I tend to click on the links it has when the browser opens. So I tend to use these communities as the internet gateway as you say - like hacker news! This concept of the internet gateway and the perceptual islands of ideas is really interesting, I think you should someday write about this.

This is one of the things I liked about StumbleUpon. You never knew what you were going to get, but it was almost always something interesting.

>All the fun and weird stuff is still around, it just typically doesn't SEO well and doesn't show up on Google, and is too long-tail to show up on popularity-based algorithms like those of Reddit or Facebook.

In other words, it's a bunch of dead websites and there is little incentive to create anything out of the ordinary.

Dead in what sense?

The web in the 90s was an evolving, alive ecosystem. Without the ecosystem, websites that approximate something old-school are standalone entities. Flowers in a vase. They might look the same or even temporarily feel the same, but they are both authored and browsed in an entirely different context.

For example, browsing a website that looks original, but is likely abandoned is a very different experience from browsing it in the 90s or early 00s when it was a part of something big, new and exciting. Even if the content is identical. The same principle applies to authoring.

I have seen countless claims that all the technology that someone could use in the 90s is still available. Regardless of whether it's true or not (mostly not), it misses the point. The social project that was web 1.0 is now defunct.

Paradoxically, the only way to create something equivalent to old-school web now is to invent something entirely new.

I don't get what you mean. That ecosystem is still alive, though. It's easy to miss because lives in the shadow of another parallel ecosystem, but it's still there, and it still roughly functions the same.

Web 1.0 was and still is a fringe project by and for oddballs. Just like most people in the '90s didn't know how to get on the web, most people today can't find their way past google and social media. In that regard, it's very much still the same.

Thanks.

This site is excellent, worth a submission of its own.

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