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Comment by Alpi | Hacker News Reader

Ok you got me, I feel nostalgic. What strikes me most is that those people from 90th were putting their creativity into something only handful of people will ever see, they were effectively shouting to void.

I would love to be still able to discover low-ranging websites like this. I remember somebody shared some alternative search engine?

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> What strikes me most is that those people from 90th were putting their creativity into something only handful of people will ever see, they were effectively shouting to void.

Well you had visitor counters and guestbooks. There was obviously no expectation to go "viral" and have millions of visitors, but it felt social in a different way. More like a small cozy neighborhood, less like a train station.

I made a website for my amateur games at the time, with the requisite visitor counters and guestbook. I was fortunate enough to find an archive somewhere, and saw someone who worked at a library had come across my site and left some encouraging words. For me, that was the best part of the web back then.

Check out

* https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/random

* https://ooh.directory/

Oh, I feel like it’s quite the opposite! As a teenager I created a crappy non-English website about a topic that interested me, added it to a few local search engines (which worked more like directories) and it got tons of traffic, engagements with the guest book etc. Today, if you just create a website and have it crawled by the search engines, it will get no traffic at all.

>those people from 90th were putting their creativity into something only handful of people will ever see, they were effectively shouting to void.

That's not quite true. Your friends would see it. As would anybody browsing any directory you signed up for - your ISP, college, etc.

Nobody cared about shouting at the world back then.

https://wiby.me - search for old websites (and new websites in old style. I think the index is updated manually).

Also: https://millionshort.com/

Marginalia. Its creator hangs out on HN.

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