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Comment by tjr225 | Hacker News Reader

The years just prior to the explosion of these content algorithms were really magical.

Some time between P2P networks and piracy sites being shut down there was this amazing period of discovery. It seemed like it was mostly blogspot curated mega uploads of flac files. You could literally just curl huge, lossless, obscure records that someone else found for you. It really felt like a beautiful flash in a pan. I’m sure a lot of people still have these files hanging around on hard drives but there’s no incentive to be the curator anymore.

There would be blogs of high quality vinyl and cd rips of really thoughtfully curated clusters of types of music. I actually remember not being surprised when Kim Dotcom got arrested but being very bummed knowing the era was over.

Soulseek lives on as a weird vestige of this time, but the curation is not really there.

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Those sites still existed last I checked, which was a few years ago. Once in a while I get nostalgic for something I grabbed on one of those sites around 2005, I'll run a search for it and find three new blogs posting pirate links to an eclectic mix of music they consider cool.

I remember reading that Google did something to derank them, so they may finally be dead, but they continued on for a long time past when I visited them daily for hipster cred.

When historians settle on a periodization of internet history, the closure of what.cd will surely be a key marker.

2015-6 or so was the magical era for me. Intelligent enough to suggest you related content before you knew you needed but still early enough to not have to suffer through endless repetitive video spam for ad views.

Agreed. It was also before YouTube got really heavy-handed with the, ah, manual algorithmic interventions.

Let me guess, you were between 15 and 25 during this period?

I was between 15 and 25 between the last 20 years? Of course I was. What an oddly vague thing to try to flex on.

Perhaps you could also infer that I used linked in during that time, or maybe even instagram! Google! Software engineer!

Just for the record all I’m saying is the blogs of this particular era were very interesting to me and I miss them.

A specific window sometime between 2000 and 2010. And a majority of the US wasn't.

I've had the same conversation with old hippies about record stores and how you just don't appreciate the music when you can just find it online.

The point is that old people have rose tinted glasses to when they were finding out new things for the first time regardless of how good or bad it was.

My own take for the time was that we were starved for good video content which is why we focused on the much smaller and more easily compressible audio files.

We still exist. You just stopped looking.

I ran out of time!

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