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Comment by petetnt | Hacker News Reader

It's awesome how you can stumble upon sites that are so funny or interesting (in multiple ways) that you just want to share them immediately forward. Everyone says it but it's true: something just got lost in translation when social media pages ate the whole internet.

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My theory is that it's that on many of these sites there's no easy way to comment, like or otherwise publicly interact. Sure you could try and email the person but that takes effort and you have to talk directly to them, not to a crowd.

When you don't have to worry about a mob of negativity, you can write far more freely.

I just signed a guestbook I don’t know what you’re talking about!

Yup, social media is a one-to-many relationship, and sometimes the messy many-to-many relationship. Web 1.0 sites have more have a one-to-one posture (unless they become exceedingly popular at least)

They didn’t eat the entire Internet. They didn’t even eat the web. They set up parallel walled gardens. The web is still there. Personal websites just don’t scale to the masses. This is fine and probably for the best.

It's a nice theory if not for the fact that one never seem to run into things like these off Web searches.

You used to be able to find them deep in search results but now it’s all blogspam. It’d be nice if this stuff was easier to find.

Yes you used to be able maybe in mid/late-aughties. This is not something recent.

how about a search engine that ranks higher the less ads there are

I get this metric but at what point is the cutoff? If a small home run website has good info and gets popular, and has to add more advertisements, do they then get deranked on the search engine that led people there?

only if there is something with the same info with less ads

> If a small home run website has good info and gets popular, and has to add more advertisements

More advertisements? Any advertisements make the site worse. More makes it more worse.

It's so inexpensive to have a website these days, even one that pulls in a substantial number of visitors, that it's hard to make an argument that ads are necessary to pay for hosting.

Oh for sure, just a hypothetical lol. And idk maybe you write software or something that you want to keep as free as you can, so ads make it doable to sustain that. There’s any number of valid reasons to advertise, and if it’s a site for content I support I’ll probably turn of ublock so long as the ads aren’t overwhelming or obstructing

If you've missed all the HN love for it over the past while, there's a search engine here: https://search.marginalia.nu/ which is trying to achieve just that

That speaks more to the gentrification of search engines and their results rather than the loss of small, independent websites.

Once upon a time, I could search for something on Yahoo or Google and get nothing but those kinds of websites in search results, even when some central repository sites like Wikipedia were starting to take root.

Everything changed when the SEO nation attacked, and nobody expected the social media inquisition.

It's both. Loss of discoverability leads to ecological collapse of personal website. There's little point when the only reader is destined to be its own author.

Period true search methods (webrings, curated indexes, portals and early search engines) are gone and so is the fighting chance for this kind of projects.

This doesn't make Google money.

marginalia.nu will turn up a lot of these.

https://search.marginalia.nu/

The blog linked elsewhere in this thread is the #2 Google result for “how to nail jelly to a wall”. The web is very much searchable.

That's kind of the point of wiby (the site that's doing the randomization in this post). They only index web 1.0 stuff.

Not quite sure what their definition of that is, since I've seen recently updated things. Without CSS? Without JS? Maybe just websites that never make a JS fetch request once they're loaded.

What I've found consistently scarier this past decade+ is the casualness and seeming inevitability with which vast swathes of the population can be captured by unfavorable technology and social spaces or narratives.

And yeah, what you and others here often enough describe(d) are the shadows on the wall. Keeping civilization and culture on track really is a constant struggle.

Vast swaths of the population are uninteresting rubes. Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter are all doing us a favor by keeping those people occupied and their drivel contained.

The MSM/MEM as population control vehicle/idiot honeypot is a salient angle though you quickly get into self-fulfilling prophecy stuff there. Perhaps it's me being overly pessimistic, but I too might have been captured by the mind-rot matrix if I had grown up with that shit, never knowing what was or could be.

The web isn’t going to help there. Crackpots made websites too.

You aren’t responsible for what other people do. Just live your own life.

I'm not and yet the fate of a population is not arbitrary. MSM is society-level technology and it's clearly doing something to it that would not have happened in its absence.

I'm seeing it in personal acquaintances, who get lost in the information garbage sphere and struggle to contextualize the places that unfavorably shape their belief system (not talking about niche crackpot sites, but trash media here).

This is the polar opposite of what I had hoped would happen with this technology before it got captured by economic incentives. And it's also not what would have happened, had this mold not proliferated, and slower but curated systems prevailed.

It's not all terrible, there's resilience and adaptation. And yet I cannot stop feeling we're dealing with a quite unwelcome phenomenon that weakens a sizable part of us who would profit from a more controlled information environment the most (the dumb get dumber, the smart get smarter, and everyone gets more distracted and fickle).

What do you mean by MSM? To me that is “mainstream media”. I don’t understand how that is applicable here.

Mainstream social (or entertainment) media, by which I mean all the content consumption apps your typical non-tech parents or acquaintances in that age group know about (in my case Instagram, Facebook and ragebait meme groups but luckily not yet TikTok; the wider web outside news sites is pretty much unknown).

Reddit or Mastodon for instance I would not call mainstream from my standpoint, but I left the former site many years ago and have no idea about its current popularity (my only contemporary use is when it pops up in my searches as a sort of wildcard forum).

Sorry, if that's not the usual usage of MSM.

MSM usually means "Main Stream Media". So like broadcast and cable news and conventional newspapers. Overloading it to refer to social media is really confusing because social media is pretty much the opposite thing.

"Entertainment news" is a sub-genre of MSM, typically you see this on the cable news channels or the "opinion" section of a newspaper.

If you get your news from Facebook you aren't getting it from "the MSM" as that term is generally understood. I guess you could coin MSSM for "Main Stream Social Media" to differentiate Twitter from Mastodon (or Reddit from HN?) but honestly I think you can just type out "social media" and not die of fatigue.

http://www.crank.net/

who _wasn't_ talking about skull and bones in 2003

I’m relistening to the behind the bastards on the Illuminati so…still talking about it to this day lmao

Isn’t hacker news doing the same thing for the most parts? This is a little rude but I went through your history and maybe you should be more careful who you call “uninteresting rubes” and “drivel”.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think you're in the category. I don't think anyone is. I'm just poking a little at your self awareness and your lack of respect toward your fellow people. I do think there is an issue with the walled gardens, but I don't think it's the people who use them. It's the psychological effect of having affirmation systems tied to everything you post. I'm sure most people would post waaaaaaaay less "uninteresting" content if it wasn't because of the dopamine chase. I'm guilty of it myself. I try to ask myself if I'm really trying to contribute or if I'm just posting to get likes, and sometimes it prevents me from posting things to social media sites. There are a lot of time where it doesn't though. You may not put much value in Reddits karma system, but what value do you put into your hacker news account? I know from my own experience that it's been fairly healthy for me to create a new account every time I reach a 1000 points. I hope that I'll eventually get to the point where I don't have to do that, but I'm not sure I'm there yet.

It's obviously up to you, but I'd encourage you to not so blatantly disregard other people for what they post on social media. Because social media is a game for our attention, and most of us chase that sweet dopamine rush, even though everything we post on social media sort of disappears after a day and is frankly invisible in the sea of sameness posted by our peers.

Speaking as someone else, I go on reddit because there are occasional domain experts. It's 99% repetitive drivel (I myself am guilty of the same) and 1% person who actually knows what they're talking about.

That number is proportional to %experts/%non-experts, and is inversely correlated with the size of a subreddit (though the AskHistorians subreddit remains an excellent exception), and is the reason why the NonCredibleDefense is usually more credible than the CredibleDefense.

I personally drifted to hackernews from reddit as a general "reddit", but I find it's probably wise to take with a grain of salt the legal/maths/physics/economics/"anything not related to computer science" opinions of the people here. It's probably a good general rule of thumb to only take advice from experts in their domains.

I’m a Reddit expat, the only app that made it usable is dead now so here I am. I know I won’t find talk on Dead Cells tips or Rocket League coaching, but at least there’s lots of good tech discussion and occasional political shitposting that feeds that part of my soul

That’s incredibly reductive and shows you maybe don’t spend time in these spaces based on your perceptions? Many of my friends are talented makers who use social media to communicate about what they do with friends and fans. I’ve learned a lot about knitting and crochet through finding people with those skills on social media. I’ve made strong personal connections with strangers far far from me. I’ve found groups to share and debate and discuss topics important to me.

And acting like “quarantining” people to keep them out of your other online spaces is a good thing? Gross. More access and spread of information helps everyone become more interesting, it spurs innovation, it fosters creativity.

I came to HN after the Reddit API stuff killed Apollo, and though I’ve been here before from search engines, I’m now really getting into the community. It’s been great to see different things and feel inspired to look at how I do thinks in my profession. I wish I had really spent more time here sooner, but fortunately for you I was relegated to my drivel on Reddit until now.

These sites only get shared via some sort of centralized (or not) type of social media. AIM and MSN was the craze back then, you either saw web 1.0 stuff from your friends there, or coworkers via email.

Another aspect is that you could actually find these sites in the past. I have vague recollections of spending hours going through a bunch of garbage to find some goldmine Web 1.0 site. I don’t remember the last time I found an old site like these

That’s a huge stretch of the definition. Back then discovery was often via people’s personal “directory” web pages.

Sharing links with MSN and AIM came much later when you could be online significantly more.

some really interesting text too.

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