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Comment by detourdog | Hacker News Reader

The first annotation network I remember was pre-2000. They could only get investment if they created a system that required modifying DNS. I struggled against this and was the last commercial internet work I did.

The commercial web shifted the development from people self-publishing to ads that needed to be sold.

This has had a tremendous effect on everything.

The best example I have is the massive infrastructure many people insist is required for a website.

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> The best example I have is the massive infrastructure many people insist is required for a website.

This is my biggest pet peeve, and I think a lot of it (among supposedly tech-savvy people at least, less technical people are a different story) is caused by people looking at the cost of a random selection of AWS products, often quoting on-demand prices rather than the 40% discount you can get by buying a year of reserved capacity at once, multiplying by 12, and then freaking out.

Many cloud products are not good deals, and almost seem designed to make people think running a web service is inaccessible to them. Those products are usually given a healthy markup because you’re paying to avoid certain setup steps or for the ability to scale infinitely large in two clicks.

You can still just rent a few cheap servers (or even just one) and, if you set them up properly, you can run a decently sized website off of them no problem.

Agreed, a 3 year reserved small ec2 is a few bucks a month. It can run multiple small websites fine. Hosting has never been more accessible, people just get scared by the concept.

I think what scares a lot of people is the prospect of maintaining a server, configuring it to be secure and keeping it up to speed with security updates. With a cloud product, the only concern becomes keeping your project's dependencies updated which is less intimidating.

It's something that's on my mind when I think about launching a site that's intended to draw a significant userbase. Back in the day I'd set up VPS instances with nginx+unicorn+rails and it was relatively smooth, but security has seemingly become so much more critical that I don't know I'd trust myself to get all the biggest holes patched up and more importantly, keep them patched.

Yes. It's the "servers should be cattle not pets" philosophy; then you realize that having one server necessarily makes it a "pet" that demands periodic care and feeding with occasional emergencies that cost money or wake you up at night.

Also: people use big services for discovery. If you write a blog, nobody's going to read it unless you get out there on the social media and promote it.

Discovey as a reason to spend money is another web ad fantasy. The old days discovery was by word of mouth. The trust deficit goes down when one doe t rely on discovery.

How important is it to discover a blog post no one is talking about?

It's important to the writer, surely? Why write if you have no readers? I mean, ultimately that's why we're writing these comments here to each other rather than each on our own web sites?

The attitude before discovery was if you build it they will come. I see most people pushing discovery/SEO becuase it is complex and people can be convinced it is needed.

A writer needing an audience is nothing new. I think it is just as valid to create no matter what comes.

A website is a poorly defined term.

A personal blog is a website.

A forum is a website.

YouTube is a website.

Amazon.com is a website.

Twitter is a website.

They all require very different technology (especially backed) very different technical resources, vastly different amount of labor.

Also, on a lot of smaller websites, crawling bots produce the majority of visits. With www being so big, and its common attractors so strong, it's really hard to have an audience.

All of those I can host from my home with a static IP. They all require a web server. Some may need databases. One needs a streaming service. You are correct that most traffic is some sort of crawler. If one isn't worried about discoverability one get pretty aggressive in killing those sessions. One can develop one's own blacklist. I happen to be toiling away with such a system. We may get the chance to see what happens to an anti-discovery network movement pops up.

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